Hongtao Yi

Florida State University | FSU · Askew School of Public Administration and Policy

State and local governments in the U.S. are actively promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency to seek economic development opportunities and create green jobs. This study evaluates the employment effects of state and local clean energy and climate policies in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs) in 2006. The regression analysis shows that both st...

For policy makers in China, the development of a green economy presents opportunities and challenges not only for the central government, but also for provincial and city governments. This study measures clean energy economy at the city level in China, by counting green jobs and firms through an analytical approach. As shown in this study, green jo...

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decompo...

Despite extensive research on energy justice, little has been written about whether scholarly discourse on energy justice has translated into public social media discourse. This paper addresses this gap by examining Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) communications on social media. To date, this study is the first research utilizing social netwo...

Policy diffusion based on learning mechanisms has fascinated political science and public administration scholars for a long time. A robust and growing body of studies have identified the existence and importance of learning mechanisms in policy diffusion. However, there are still some gaps that need to be further improved. First, scholars identify...

Energy structural transformation plays a strategically important role in achieving the dual-carbon reduction goals. Among the various approaches to carbon reduction, the Chinese government regards the growth of the new energy industry as an essential means. Considering that the government policy support determines the long-term growth of the new en...

This article aims to extend the political market framework by exploring whether policy demand or supply is the key consideration for local governments’ policymaking and under what financial conditions local governments favor one over the other. We expect that local governments with good fiscal conditions are more likely to respond to public demand,...

Most studies on public sector benchmarking focus on performance indicators, processes, and outcomes of managed benchmarking. This article, instead, explores the formation of spontaneous interstate benchmarking networks among U.S. state agency leaders. Informed by social comparison theory, we first recategorize benchmarking into best practice benchm...

Organizational learning has long been recognized as a key determinant of success, yet research often overlooks how individual mechanisms initiate and drive collective learning over time. Utilizing policy tourism as an indicator of intercity learning, we construct an interlocal learning network among US cities from 2009 to 2016. Employing a temporal...

Information asymmetry is prevalent in the vertical bureaucratic structures of unitary systems. Drawing upon the institutional collective action (ICA) framework and the literature on information politics, this paper investigates the formation of the vertical ICA dilemma and the motivations underlying the collaborative mechanisms to address informati...

When do environmental targets improve the environmental performance of local governments? Previous studies have reached inconsistent conclusions on the effectiveness of environmental targets. Drawing on the principal-agent theory, this article identifies goal divergence and information asymmetry as challenges that impede the achievement of environm...

The majority of the world's largest carbon emitters are either federations or have adopted systems of decentralised governance. The realisation of the world's climate mitigation objectives therefore depends in large part on whether and how governments within federal systems can cooperate to reduce carbon emissions and catalyse the emergence of low-...

This article examines the mechanisms underlying the formation of U.S. national clean energy policy network. Informed by the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, this article develops and tests hypotheses regarding cooperation versus coordination hypotheses regarding the reasons underlying clean energy policy actors’ networking activitie...

In response to the increasing attention paid to environmental governance and leadership mobility, this study explores the interactions between leadership mobility and environmental governance performance. From the perspective of networks, this study aims to determine whether leadership mobility networks shape environmental governance outcomes. We a...

This study examines the role of change agents, city leaders, and their networks in facilitating interlocal collaboration in environmental governance. We propose an Agent Network Collaboration (ANC) model that brings individual managers, as change agents, back into the study of the interlocal agreement (ILA). We argue that the leadership transfer ne...

While receiving more attention in the policy sciences in recent years, much remains unknown about policy conflicts. This research analyzes 48 in-depth qualitative interviews of people involved in, or familiar with, conflicts associated with shale oil and gas (aka “fracking”) policy proposals and decisions across 15 U.S. states. We ask the question:...

In recent years, local governments have taken an increasingly prominent role in the use and promotion of so-called “green” technologies. Cities and counties that own their own utilities have a unique set of opportunities and incentives to involve citizens in “green” initiatives. Some of those governments invest significant levels of resources on en...

Policy conflicts are ubiquitous in many countries. Yet research on policy conflict is typically based on cases in western, democratic countries. As a result, little is known about the characteristics of policy conflicts in non‐western countries, such as China, or how these characteristics compare to western contexts. The Policy Conflict Framework (...

Self-organizing networks and designed networks are important subjects of network research, but the extant literature explores them in isolation, with limited attention paid to their relationship. And many studies on self-organizing and designed networks are based on Western contexts. This article expands the network literature through analyzing the...

Policy tourism is an important but rarely studied phenomenon describing a widespread practice, through which local public and business leaders form delegations, choose target cities and implement intercity policy diffusion, business exchange and economic collaboration. Our research examines how executive leadership characteristics, city‐level conte...

Data manipulation is considered one of the most pernicious forms of information distortion that challenges the effectiveness of the principals in monitoring agents. This study investigates factors influencing the behaviors of data manipulation from the perspective of patronage networks. Patronage networks feature a reciprocal exchange between patro...

Measuring policy conflict and concord about natural resource and environmental issues has been a challenge for scholars. While some have assessed policy conflict and concord in particular locations, current approaches are inadequate for measuring and comparing them across settings or over time. This research note offers a methodological approach fo...

The way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legisl...

Local public managers are mobile in their career trajectories. While the extant public administration literature has predominantly examined this topic from a leadership turnover perspective, few studies have approached the career trajectories of local managers from a holistic, system-level angle. This article draws upon the vacancy chain literature...

Policy conflicts manifest in a variety of ways along the policy process. The design components of public policies may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended duration of policymaking processes. This paper explores the associations between the composition of public policies and the relative duration for policies to be adopted by U.S. state le...

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) is one of the most widely adopted clean energy policies in the U.S. However, organized elite power groups, backed by ample political and economic resources, have been known to lead RPS termination efforts. In the context of state renewable energy politics, organized elite power includes legislators affiliated wit...

Disentangling the relationship between economic development and environmental protection has attracted much attention from public administration scholars. While traditionally scholars approach the relationships from either a substitutive or a complementary perspective, we offer a nuanced perspective by examining how the target setting on economic g...

Change agents play important roles in the diffusion of policy innovation. Scholars argue that the career paths of change agents could facilitate the diffusion of innovation through network‐based mechanisms of portable innovation or policy wormholes, but have not fully distinguished between direct and indirect connections inherently important in a l...

New energy development strategies play a crucial role in achieving urban green economic growth. Among these policies, new energy demonstration programs are a popular and effective strategy widely adopted among local governments in China. Despite the practical significance of these new energy demonstration programs, very few studies examined their i...

Urban Governance Journal introduction and call for papers

Existing studies rarely examine the relationship between network structure and network performance. To fill this research gap, this article collects inter-local collaboration network data from 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region of China from 2009 to 2015. Based on the institutional collective action framework and social capital theory, we...

Based on the collaborative governance framework, this paper proposes four starting conditions that affect the establishment of intergovernmental collaboration: power imbalance, resource imbalance, prehistory of collaboration and participation of superior levels of government. The interaction of these conditions is tested with collaborative practice...

Network effectiveness is an important topic in network research. While many studies have been conducted in the Western contexts, few scholars have examined this topic in the area of environmental governance in the context of China. Taking the low-carbon governance networks of 16 cities in China as the research context, this article adopts the metho...

This paper portrays a polycentric governance system by exploring the evolution of its structure and the interdependencies of its policymaking venues. It utilizes a semi-automated approach developed from the institutional grammar to analyze four policymaking venues by their 55 public policies adopted from 2007 through 2019 in the context of oil and...

This article compares the topics that underlie public debate around hydraulic fracturing covered in newspapers across nine U.S. states over an eleven-year period. In analyzing more than 7000 newspaper articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling, thirteen main topics emerge. While these topics fluctuate over time, their relative freque...

This study aims to answer the following research question: how do collaborative networks affect the performance of individual policy actors embedded in the network? We examine this question with a unique dataset on water governance in Dongguan city, China. We hypothesize that collaborative network affects the environmental performance of policy act...

With the recent trend toward collaborative governance, governmental and nongovernmental actors are actively engaged in the environmental governance in China, forming formal and informal networks in this process. While existing research has mostly examined the formation of either formal or informal networks, few studies have examined the influence o...

Local water governance is challenging given the significance to public health and the difficulties to manage it in a fragmented administrative system. A collaboration network is a popular governance tool in local governance to cope with functional fragmentation problems and institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas. Empirical works are needed...

Designing and implementing effective new energy vehicle (NEV) policy are policy priorities for policymakers and energy policy scholars. However, the formulation, adoption, and diffusion of the NEV policies have not been fully examined in the extant literature. This article explores the mechanisms driving the diffusion of local financial subsidy pol...

The article assesses internationalization of Public Administration education in China based on international students' perceptions toward forms of the educational institution's internationalization. Research for the article was quantitatively based on a case study of one of the Chinese institutions of higher learning offering Public Administration...

Recycling solid waste not only produces environmental and health benefits, but also generates economic benefit. This paper empirically evaluates the employment impact of Florida county recycling programs from 2000 through 2011, applying a fixed effects regression model. The results indicate that a one percentage point increase of county recycling r...

This article explores the effects of city managers' career paths on the diffusion of climate policy innovation among municipal governments in the United States. Using the agent network diffusion (AND) model, the authors hypothesize that local climate policy innovations are portable and that cities may learn from distant jurisdictions to which they...

Industry cluster’s agglomeration effects facilitate higher productivity for enterprises located in the industry cluster. This paper examines the agglomeration effects of industry cluster on firm’s innovation performance through studying the network embeddedness of the biopharmaceutical companies using cross-sectional data from 2011 to 2015. Measuri...

Functional fragmentation among city departments has been a critical public administration problem in practice and theory. This paper investigates the political and administrative motivations for the reform from functionally fragmented water governance model towards an integrative agency design. Drawing on the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) f...

Although scholars of policy diffusion have explored the effects of learning, competition, and geographic proximity in the diffusion process, extant theories have not paid enough attention to the roles of the change agents. This study proposes an Agent Network Diffusion (AND) model that explicitly models how leadership transfer networks, a complex s...

With the deterioration of the environment across the globe, environmental problems have attracted much attention from the public, academia, and governments. This study contributes to the understanding of environmental policy implementation by empirically testing the policy feedback theory and official ranking tournament theory in the Chinese contex...

Political mobilization of policy actors into advocacy coalitions is a defining feature of policy subsystems. Nonetheless, knowledge about the particularities of advocacy coalitions across different political systems remains limited. This paper offers insights for comparative analysis of advocacy coalitions by exploring the issue of shale developmen...

Administrative fragmentation among government agencies has posed a significant challenge to environmental governance. However, few studies have theoretically examined and empirically measured how local governments in China address this with collaborative approaches. Informed by the ecology of games framework (EGF), this paper examined the status of...

China meets increasingly serious solid waste problems and has adopted various policies in response in recent years. Meanwhile, few studies have investigated the performance of solid waste disposal through statistical analysis with empirical data. This study examines provincial resource use policy's influence on the comprehensive utilization rate of...

Over the past decade, Chinese local governments have adopted numerous innovations to address pressing social, economic, and environmental concerns. Realizing the limitations of unilateral policy actions, cities have increasingly relied on inter-local collaboration to address urgent regional policy issues in service delivery, environmental protectio...

Comparing and evaluating the performance of governance networks are important tasks for researchers and practitioners of network governance and public administration. Limited by the lack of network data across space and time, the study of network performance and effectiveness at the network level is not on pace with advances in theories and methodo...

High levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that free-riding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action. This study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non-excl...

This research investigates why various mechanisms of cooperation among local authorities are chosen using the theoretical lens of institutional collective action (ICA). The article analyzes 564 local collaboration agreements drawn from four urban regions of China to explain the choices of environmental collaboration agreements among cities. Example...

Over the past decade, cities have emerged as leaders in sustainability and climate protection in the United States. ICLEI, a voluntary network of local governments, played an important role driving this trend. After years of steady growth, ICLEI became a target of political opposition and its membership dropped significantly from 2010 to 2012. This...

It is a critical question for environmental governance to examine whether the administrative award and punishment measures are effective in promoting environmental governance performance. Choosing the implementation of a mandatory target system (MTS) as the subject, this paper employs a fixed-effect panel data model and regression discontinuity des...

Methods for observing policy networks have not kept up with the development of new network analytic techniques required to understand governance in complex settings. We compare three unobtrusive methods for observing policy networks based on hyperlinks between policy actor web sites, on media reports, and on public policy partnerships. Observations...

Wind energy has become a fast growing industry in China in the last decade. The development of the wind energy industry presents interesting policy questions. In the context of China, in additional to national energy policies, provincial policies were designed and implemented to stimulate the growth of wind power. This paper examines factors, espec...

In recent years, many areas of China have suffered from serious haze pollution, which greatly affects human health and daily life. It is of policy importance to understand the factors that influence the spatial concentration of PM2.5. Based on data from 74 cities with PM2.5 monitoring stations in 2013 and 2014, this study presents the overall haze...

Measuring and tracking the numbers of jobs in solid waste management and recycling industries over time provide basic data to inform decision makers about the important role played by this sector in a state or region's 'green economy'. This study estimates the number of people employed in the solid waste and recycling industry from 1989 through 201...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine state adoption of climate action plans (CAPs) and investigates the factors driving the adoption of these climate policies in the states. Design/methodology/approach – The framework that is formulated to explain the state climate actions involves four dimensions: climate risks, climate politics, climate economic...

State governments in the United States have enacted various clean-energy policies to decarbonize electric utilities, diversify energy supplies, and stimulate economic development. With a panel data set for 48 continental states from 1990 to 2008, fixed-effect panel regressions are estimated to test the impacts of clean-energy policies on total carb...

A considerable amount is known about the factors that influence policy adoption and implementation across different issue areas. Less is known, however, about the factors that influence governments to abandon programs or policies prior to reaching their stated objectives or originally specified end-points. This article applies termination theory to...

Solar photovoltaic (PV) installations have been growing rapidly in the United States over the last few years, incentivized by policies from federal, state and local governments. The complex relationships between solar policies at multiple levels of government and solar deployment are questions of importance to policy makers and scholars. Extant lit...

In a clean energy economy, green businesses play a central role by utilizing renewable energy technologies and employing green labor forces to provide clean energy services and goods. This paper aims at analyzing factors driving the growth and survival of green businesses in the U.S. states, with hypotheses proposed on the impacts from clean energy...

Municipal-owned utilities perform an important role in local government efforts. Municipal ownership of utility operations provides advantages in involving citizens in sustainability and energy-efficiency practices. This paper explores the variation in municipal-owned utilities investment in energy-efficiency strategies by examining how spending on...

This paper investigates the relationship between state adoption of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) policies, tax incentives and renewable energy production. The unique contribution of this paper is to analyze renewable energy development from a political perspective by investigating the influence of political and policy variables. Hypotheses re...

High levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that freeriding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action. This study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non-exclu...

Municipal-owned utilities perform an important role in local government efforts to implement energy-efficiency strategies and practices. Utility ownership provides unique opportunities for local governments to involve citizens in “green” initiatives. This paper seeks to understand why some governments with municipal-owned utilities invest resources...

Abstract will be provided by author.