States such as Texas ("Municipal Utility Districts") and Florida ("Community Development Districts") authorize the creation of developer-initiated special purpose districts. These districts can issue infrastructure development bonds which are then paid off by future residents. Development districts in many respects act as a substitute for municipal governments, but operate much differently, raising important efficiency and equity questions.

Climate change necessitates major changes in infrastructure siting, design, and operations. Successful adaptation of infrastructure management requires overcoming thorny institutional challenges including path dependency and isomorphic pressures that inhibit major shifts in norms and practices. Hazards have been posited as a potential trigger for changing long-standing institutions because they can upend stable system states. However, research on the ability of hazards to shift norms and practices is still nascent and focuses on rapid-onset disasters like floods, hurricanes, or fires.

Policymakers typically seek to account for tradeoffs in infrastructure decision-making with technical tools like multicriteria decision-analysis, life cycle assessment, and large-scale ecological models. However, while much attention is paid to mechanistic connections between interrelated infrastructure (e.g., effects on streamflow, water temperature, or agricultural runoff), the complex dependencies between water, energy, and food infrastructure pose political and social tradeoffs that extend far beyond engineering considerations.

The performance of energy service providers has important environmental and safety consequences in local communities. Oil and gas pipeline leaks are the responsibility of a wide range of stakeholders including utilities, the public, construction firms and state safety program personnel. As a result, in the United State, state pipeline safety programs focus heavily on public education, outreach, and stakeholder participation so as to reduce the occurrence of these events.

This project investigates the collaborative governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project seeks to identify, map and understand the governance, ecological and infrastructural interdependencies existing in the Bay Area insofar as climate adaptation to sea level rise is concerned. The project is a joint effort with University of California Berkeley Dept of Engineering and New York University Abu Dhabi Engineering Division. It is financed by a NSF Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) grant.

This projects investigates the role of social networks and social influence in travel behavior. Sustainable transportation programs may benefit from the incorporation of social influence through knowledge sharing, establishment of behavioral norms and peer-to-peer participation recruitment. The next phase of this ongoing research will involve evaluation of social influence as a tool in pilot sustainable transportation programs.

This is an umbrella project for several different research efforts focused on the adoption and implementation of local government environmental policies. A central theoretical focus of this project is how local government institutions such as the structure of city councils and the mayor/city manager office mediates the influence of interest groups on policy decisions. We are also interested in how the environmental and energy policies we study are connected to the broader of idea of sustainability.