Governing metropolitan green infrastructure in the United States

This study of six major tree planting initiatives sought to better understand the nature of the governance structures that underlie these projects. Do they reflect a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach involving NGOs, the scientific community, business and government as is believed to be necessary for environmental projects to be successful or is the government “going it alone”? And have these initiatives become “mainstreamed” and incorporated into the city’s institutional structure or do they remain isolated efforts? To answer these questions, public, private, and community representatives familiar with each city’s tree planting initiative were interviewed. Overall, interviewees perceived their projects’ vision, planning and execution to fall firmly in the public sphere rather than being the product of non-traditional actors (non-profits, business and scientific communities). Despite this dominance of the public sector in the governance of the tree planting initiatives, there was little evidence that the initiatives had successfully been “mainstreamed” into government, with limited gains in policies and regulations and in budgeting.