Institutions are strategies, norms, and rules embodied in public policies and/or social conventions. They reflect and establish expectations about who can do what, where, and how, and are often employed for resolving collective action dilemmas and other kinds of governance challenges. Given their salience, social science scholars have dedicated substantial effort to developing analytical approaches for understanding the design, function, and performance of institutions. Particularly valuable are approaches that generalize across institutional types and are versatile enough to be paired with multiple concepts, theories, and methods. This paper focuses on one such approach, called the Institutional Grammar. The Institutional Grammar is an approach for assessing the structure and content of institutions. It received limited attention immediately following its introduction. In recent years, however, numerous journal articles have been published that highlight the promise of the Institutional Grammar for supporting rigorous analyses of institutional design and associated outcomes within the context of various theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches. This article (i) reintroduces parts of the Institutional Grammar; (ii) summarizes the theoretical, methodological, and empirical foci of all journal articles published to date that address it; and (iii) presents an agenda for advancing the study of institutions using the Institutional Grammar.

This article applies a strategic management lens to local government sustainability capabilities to examine the conditions under which local governments diversify into new areas of service delivery and when they do not. Building on recent efforts to apply resource-based theories to the public sector, the authors distinguish between more and less fungible capabilities and posit that local government officials make such commitments to enhance the competitiveness of their communities. Two surveys of U.S. cities provide evidence that governments that rely on tax incentive-based development approaches may struggle to make sustainable development gains. Such cities are more likely to devote resources disproportionately to delivering benefits to firms at the risk of incurring increasing opportunity costs over time. Prior commitments to traditional, firm-based economic development capabilities appear to inhibit their ability to pursue broader sustainability policies. However, economic development strategic planning can also positively influence some investments in greenhouse gas reduction efforts. Moreover, cities facing more competition for development are more likely to integrate planning and performance measurement to assess their sustainability commitments.

COVID‐19 is exposing a nexus between communities disproportionately suffering from underlying health conditions, policy‐reinforced disparities, and susceptibility to the disease. As the virus spreads, policy responses will need to shift from focusing on surveillance and mitigation to recovery and prevention. Local governments, with their histories of mutual aid and familiarity with local communities, are capable of meeting these challenges. However, funding must flow in a flexible enough fashion for local governments to tailor their efforts to preserve vital services and rebuild local economies. The authors argue that the Community Development Block Grant and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant programs are mechanisms for providing funds in a manner that is adaptable to local context while also focusing on increasing social equity. Administrators must emphasize the fourth pillar of public administration—social equity—in framing government responses to the pandemic.

Although the water management sector is often characterized as resistant to risk and change, urban areas across the United States are increasingly interested in creating opportunities to transition toward more sustainable water management practices. These transitions are complex and difficult to predict – the product of water managers acting in response to numerous biophysical, regulatory, political, and financial factors within institutional constraints. Gaining a better understanding of how these transitions occur is crucial for continuing to improve water management. This paper presents a replicable methodology for analyzing how urban water utilities transition toward sustainability. The method combines standardized quantitative measures of variables that influence transitions with contextual qualitative information about a utility's unique decision making context to produce structured, data‐driven narratives. Data‐narratives document the broader context, the utility's pretransition history, key events during an accelerated period of change, and the consequences of transition. Eventually, these narratives should be compared across cases to develop empirically‐testable hypotheses about the drivers of and barriers to utility‐level urban water management transition. The methodology is illustrated through the case of the Miami‐Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) in Miami‐Dade County, Florida, and its transition toward more sustainable water management in the 2000s, during which per capita water use declined, conservation measures were enacted, water rates increased, and climate adaptive planning became the new norm.

Local government innovations occur within environments characterized by high service‐need complexity and risk. The question of how broader environmental conditions influence governmental willingness or ability to innovate has been a long‐standing concern within organizational, management, and policy scholarship. Although wealth and education are robust predictors of the propensity to engage in a wide range of local sustainability activities, the linkages among governmental fragmentation, social inequality, and sustainability policies are not well understood. This study focuses on the conditions both within and across city boundaries in urban regions which inhibit adoption of sustainable development innovations. We utilize a Bayesian item response theory approach to create a new scale measuring sustainability commitment by local governments in the United States. The analysis finds service‐need complexity and capacity within local governments' organizational task environments have nonlinear influences on innovation in terms of both green building and social inclusion policy tools.