Stuck between a rock and a hard place - explaining local government failure to implement land use controls

I propose that further bringing together the bureaucratic reputation and the blame-avoidance literature allows us to better understand bureaucratic organisations' failures to implement land use planning policies that reduce vulnerability to natural hazards such as flooding and wildfires. These instruments are becoming increasing important due to climate change. Yet, the land use planning instruments available to local governments to address the increasing risk–like managed retreat or development restrictions in hazardous zones–often are not implemented, leaving people to live in dangerous places. It is assumed that local governments are reputation-sensitive when they are implementing planning controls, because their success is deeply connected to having a good relationship with their local community and broader audiences. This sensitivity, I contend, leads to omissions when a) the required action would have a negative impact on the relationship with a relevant audience (for example, when restricting development could lead to protests by affected landowners) and b) actors in the respective local bureaucratic organisation perceive to have limited organisational resources to engage in blame-games. Drawing on the blame avoidance literature in terms of harm avoidance being a powerful motivator for the behaviour of bureaucratic actors, the argument is that when the local actor has fewer available strategies to avoid or reduce expected blame, they act more defensively to protect their reputation with relevant audiences. For instance, this would be the case if they lacked statutory or higher-level support from relevant public actors. To put it another way, local bureaucracies react to reputational threats in the implementation phase when there is a chance that the issue may become politicised and when they simultaneously believe they have few resources to engage in potentially contentious processes. In the paper, I test the proposed mechanism in an in-depth process-tracing case study of Melbourne, Australia, where the failure to adopt land use controls made the community more susceptible to fire, which had terrible repercussions in a subsequent disaster in 2000. While the mechanism can be broadly confirmed, there are some additional insights into how the institutional context impacts the perception of reputational threats.