Seeing No Evil? Social Vulnerabilities, Collective Inference and Organizational Divergence

Abstract This article examines the relationship between social vulnerabilities and the attention paid to them by local governments. Drawing from collective action and cognitive theories, we conceptualize planning as an organization-level inference process of selecting strategies to minimize gaps between expected and desired futures. Responding to public administration scholars who have called for advancing theories of managing risks, we examine whether local planning processes are responsive to community disadvantages and how the administrative arrangements and coordination efforts of local governments influence this sensitivity. In doing so, we highlight a phenomenon labeled organizational divergence, in which a collective’s perceived community disadvantages differ from reality. Examining climate action, economic development and sustainability plans, combined with survey and spatial data on environmental burdens for 462 municipal governments, we find evidence, using a multiphase Bayesian analytic strategy, that institutional designs which empower professional city managers increase the probability cities will engage in broader types of planning but decrease the odds they will prioritize social vulnerabilities. However, these cities are more likely to minimize divergence relative to mobility and water-related vulnerabilities. Conversely, greater functional coordination across governmental units increases the probability of prioritizing vulnerabilities in planning but also increases organizational divergence.