Greening the Rust Belt: An Unexpected Link Between Manufacturing Jobs & Sustainability

, a Ph.D. graduate from NC State who is now an assistant professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore.Christopher Galik:

Given pressing environmental challenges like climate change, along with gridlock at the federal level preventing all-encompassing, top-down solutions to these challenges, we wanted to better understand why communities adopt sustainability plans and practices at the local level.More specifically, we wanted to see if historical factors played a role in local communities’ sustainability commitments and decisions.

On one hand, we’re just adding in another variable to the same types of models that others have long used to tease out these relationships. On the other hand, to even see if our initial hypothesis made sense, we had to connect branches of research that don’t usually talk to each other. In this case, it was linking work from those who research community-level sustainability programming and those who study industrial transitions. Despite the fact that both are focusing on what’s going on in these individual communities, there really wasn’t a lot of crossover in the existing research or even in the questions being asked. From there, we needed to find data to allow us to test the connections with previous transitions.

If the results of this study play out like we think they might, there’s a possibility that efforts to help communities transition more smoothly and evenly might counterintuitively ease their eventual adoption of more sustainable practices. I think there’s always a role for policy at all levels to help guide these efforts, but in this particular case, a top-down, overnight rush might not be the most effective approach in all situations. It’s more a matter of meeting communities where they are.

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