Fostering collaboration in city governments’ sustainability, emergency management and resilience work through competency-based capacity building

Cities are challenged by climate change, natural and technological disasters and related injustices. At least three fields address these challenges within cities: sustainability , emergency management and resilience. However, these three fields often still work in silos, separated by administrative structures. One way to promote a synergistic and integrative city-level approach across the three fields is through actively fostering collaboration. This can be facilitated through a competency-based capacity building program. So far, only few capacity building programs attempted to foster collaboration across departments and fields. To address this gap the researchers collaborated with the City of Tempe, Arizona, USA to implement a program that addresses the respective sets of competencies and concepts in these fields. The question was asked how these competency sets and concepts can be integrated into one capacity building program to support collaboration across departments. The focus was on emergency management and sustainability competencies respectively, as a literature review revealed paucity of a resilience competency framework. Three capacity building trainings were implemented and competency development was evaluated using a pre-post survey and analysis of training interactions. The results show that: i) overall collaboration across departments was facilitated; ii) participants demonstrated sustainability and emergency management competencies in at least one of the three trainings, iii) participants were satisfied with the trainings individually and combined into one training program. The work concludes with recommendations to increase the development of collaborative competencies and to foster collaboration in practice in the long-term as part of “institutional work” in order to influence administrative structures as well.