CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Pusztai, Csaba |
|---|---|
| Title | Organizational Aspects of Learning for Sustainability in Local Government: A Study on Hungarian Municipalities |
| Summary | Sustainability poses a great challenge for governance because of the inherent complexity and uncertainty involved in both understanding the dynamics of socioeconomic and ecological systems and also in the coordination of action to address these problems. Facing this challenge, problem solving at all levels of government needs to embrace the opportunities for learning in a multi-stakeholder context. This thesis is a study on how municipalities in Hungary develop their capacity for addressing sustainability. I argue that this learning process for sustainability is much embedded in the local organizational culture. Municipalities with a culture more open to dialogue and inquiry will tend to be more successful in developing meta-knowledge to deal with substantive and strategic complexities. I argue that this learning process is facilitated by the informal advice relationships municipal departments maintain in their social network. In addressing my research problem, I took a quantitative approach. Based on a theoretical model specifying the key factors of learning for sustainability and their hypothesized relationships, I drew data via a survey from 161 Hungarian municipal departments involved in some aspect of local policy in one of 19 cities. Using various multivariate statistical techniques, I explored the patterns of advice seeking between departments and I also estimated a path model to test my hypotheses on organizational factors of learning for sustainability. My findings indicate that informal relationships are important in delivering opportunities to municipal departments to learn about problems. Unfortunately, interaction with other actors is dominantly motivated by political benefits (securing approval). Actors with a perceived potential to reformulate problems are peripheral. A learning oriented culture was found to have a substantial direct influence on generating meta-knowledge for sustainability. But it was also found to have a positive mediated effect on learning by facilitating informal communication with actors and also motivating departments to build more diverse advice networks. My results draw the attention to the often neglected or downplayed role of organizational factors in developing local government capacity to address issues in a sustainable way. The importance of informal relationships and soft factors such as building trust, a shared identity and an organizational culture open to dialogue and inquiry highlight the responsibility of local leadership and public management in advancing municipalities towards a more sustainable future. |
| Supervisor | Cherp, Aleh |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/ephpuc01.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University