Integrated Planning for Climate Resilience and Food Security: An Analysis of Urban Food System Resilience Planning in U.S. Cities

Abstract

Urban food systems face growing threats from extreme weather and climate disasters. The need to proactively build urban food system resilience is becoming more apparent as city planners and policymakers increasingly recognize that disasters can lead to an inability to carry out critical food system functions, such as providing food security. Addressing this cross-cutting challenge will require policy alignment and coordination between the climate and food sectors. Policy integration has long been viewed as a tool to improve governance of complex policy problems. However, research on policy integration has revealed many gaps that limit its practical utility. In many instances, poorly conceived and implemented policy integration can instead lead to policy failures. The aim of my dissertation is to provide an improved understanding of how policy actors can effectively leverage policy integration to address urgent policy problems, using integrated planning for food system resilience as a lens. I performed three interrelated studies, using a three-paper model, that contribute to an improved theoretical foundation for policy integration research as well as practical guidance to help policy actors get food system resilience onto their cities’ political agendas.

In the first paper, I conducted a systematic review of policy integration research to understand the current landscape of research on policy integration within an urban governance context, identifying the limitations from a planning perspective and ways future research can address these shortcomings. I drew on these findings in the second paper, where I applied plan evaluation methods to evaluate the extent to which U.S. cities have developed integrated plans for food system resilience. I found that few cities have developed high quality plans or plans with a comprehensive focus on food system resilience policies, and the most significant predictors of overall plan scores were the rate of food insecurity and plan type. This analysis demonstrated how plan evaluation methods could be used as a proxy to measure policy integration for the policy formulation stage of the policy process. It also provided a better understanding of actions cities should include in their plans to address food system resilience challenges.

The third paper included case studies of three U.S. cities – Baltimore, MD; Honolulu, HI; and Seattle, WA – that have integrated food system resilience in their plans, identified based on the plan evaluation performed in the second study. Through document review and interviews, I applied policy process theories to understand how case study policy actors were able to steer the urban agenda to address food system resilience challenges, including the role that policy integration played. These three cities have taken different pathways to planning for food system resilience. Despite their differences, I observed many similarities in the processes taken to facilitate policy integration and was able to develop six propositions to explain policy integration processes and developed several recommendations for various stakeholder groups to advance theory and practice related to planning for urban food system resilience in cities across the United States.