Parks & Recreation Departments are not a Joke: Environmental Governance in an Age of Post-Apocalyptic Climate Change

I employ a critical modernist lens to (re-)establish scale as a primary organizing principle for linking landscape processes and patterns. I suggest that the way to do this is to investigate the ways in which landscape patterns are shaped by governing institutions, and how governing institutions are, in turn, shaped by political-economic relations they cannot control. I incorporate theories and methods from urban geography, political ecology, and development studies to understand how institutional arrangements are structuring urban landscape change in a period of neoliberal governance. To carry out this study, I chose a popular US urban sustainability program, the tree planting initiative. In particular, I conducted a comparative analysis of tree planting initiatives in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, with myself as an active participant embedded at different times in the Forest Service, the Mayor's office in city government, and a municipal parks department. I conducted an institutional ethnography, collecting ethnographic, archival, and spatial data to systematically assess the networked and multi-scale linkages between governing institutions, constrained by political-economic relations they cannot control, and the geographic patterns of urban trees. I conclude that strong public sector leadership is a critical determinant of urban environmental governance capacity, and I offer a number of policy recommendations for building this capacity.