Understanding Network Change and Its Impact on Policy Performance

This dissertation investigates the effects of federal grant-in-aid programs on metropolitan area economic growth and recovery in "green" energy and environmental sectors of the economy, focusing on the role of self-organizing intergovernmental policy networks. Federal grant-in-aid programs are popular policy tools to bridge the gaps between fragmented local government capacities in pursuing desired policy outcomes, to facilitate collaboration and to stimulate the economy. The fragmentation of authority and responsibility for economic and environmental programs at a regional level produces institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas. Applying a network analytic approach I examine how changes in local and regional network relationships to overcome ICA dilemmas impact policy performance. This research contributes to the literature by extending the ICA framework to examine how network structure responds to changes in the underlying problem or ICA dilemma that alter risks, and how these changes in network structure then influence policy performance. This dissertation employs an integrative model to investigate the impacts of exogenous stimuli on structural changes in networks and consequent policy performance. This empirical analysis focuses on the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) as an exogenous stimulus for metropolitan green economic governance in Florida. The first analysis applies Stochastic Actor-Based Model (SABM) to test the impacts of the EECBG program on the structural changes in green economic networks among 19 metropolitan areas in Florida from 2000 to 2011. The second analysis extracts network factors from the first analysis and estimates Time-Series-Cross-Section (TSCS) models to test the hypothesized explanation for how exogenously driven changes in networks influence policy performance through green job creation in metropolitan areas.