Local Sustainability Officers’ Desire to Collaborate for Climate Action

As local communities increasingly bear the brunt of a changing climate, local sustainability officials face complex decisions about how to respond and prepare. Collaborative relationships with university-based researchers are often valuable and favored but do not always develop organically. In this descriptive study, we ask: Do sustainability policymakers have the collaborative relationships they need? Or is there unmet desire to collaborate with researchers to advance climate action? Starting with a well-defined set of research-intensive (R1) universities in the United States committed to policy engagement, we identified local sustainability policymakers adjacent to these institutions as our study population. Through 42 semi-structured elite interviews with municipal and county sustainability policymakers in the United States, we surfaced their top sustainability-related challenges, whether they are collaborating with the local R1 university on them, and, if not, whether they have unmet desire to do so. We found that 81% of policymakers expressed unmet desire to collaborate on at least one of their sustainability policy challenges. Key challenges associated with unmet desire to collaborate relate to resource constraints, lack of political support, and internal processes. Top research needs include benchmarks and case studies, research on return-on-investment, and guidance on effective climate communication strategies. Importantly, most sustainability professionals desired both informal knowledge exchange and formal partnerships with shared accountability. Our findings provide actionable information for researchers seeking to engage in climate policy efforts at the local level.