Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86). / This thesis examines the evolving shape of environmental governance using an extended case study of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, drawing on their efforts to reduce pollution in the Wisconsin foundry industry. This analysis follows the development of the Department's efforts to change their practices over the past 30 years and explores a more recent "institutional innovation" called the Benzene Reduction Action Team (otherwise known as BRAT Co.) The organization is a virtual company that brings together members from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Wisconsin Cast Metals Association (WCMA), a trade organization representing the foundry industry, in a partnership to help the industry comply with Wisconsin's Hazardous Air Pollutant rule and to collaboratively develop alternative compliance procedures. This thesis situates BRAT Co. in a wider context of government efforts to innovate within a regulatory environment and to redefine how an environmental agency can help to reduce pollution through a cooperative process that actively involves the regulated community. / by Emily C. Rubenstein. / M.C.P.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-62). / Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative - around the globe and within institutions. In this context, what is the role and relevance of the campus? I examine the scholarly output and collaboration patterns of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they pertain to its interrelated organizational structures, including institutional affiliation and spatial configuration, over a 10-year time span. There are four significant results: 1. diverging trends in the composition of collaborative teams over time (size, faculty versus non-faculty, etc.) between papers and patents; 2. patterns of cross-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration are substantively different between papers and patents; 3. a network topology and community structure that reveals spatial versus institutional collaboration trends; and 4. a persistent relationship between proximity and collaboration, well fit with an exponential decay model, that is consistent for papers, patents, and for specifically cross-disciplinary work. These insights contribute an architectural dimension to the field of scientometrics, taking a first step toward empirical foundations for applied institutional policy and spatial planning. / by Matthew Claudel. / S.M.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-134). / by Joyce S. Tavon. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-146). / Page 147 blank. / Climate change, food security, and energy efficiency have become universal challenges for global economic development and environmental conservation that demand in-depth multidisciplinary research. Biofuels have emerged as a decisive factor in the fight against global warming and air pollution from fossil fuel use, and they can play an important role in the development of poor as well as rich regions. In this work, I investigate the implications of biofuels for regional development in Brazil given its historic experience as an ethanol producer. I compare the environmental and economic impacts of the two predominant ethanol production techniques, in order to understand their effects on output, employment and income and also their potential to reduce the intensity of fossil fuel use and emissions of greenhouse gases. As I focus on a developing country, I also examine the distributional impacts of ethanol technology deployment, in terms of its potential contributions to poverty alleviation and the reduction of regional income inequalities. The production technologies currently used to produce ethanol differ spatially in Brazil, with a biotechnologically enhanced (capital-intensive) technology being used in the Southern regions of the country, and a traditional (labor-intensive) technology in the Northern regions. I take advantage of this regional variation to conduct a comparative regional analysis of ethanol production technology choice. I evaluate and compare the direct and indirect relationship between output, employment, income, energy intensity, and pollution emissions at the subnational level for the two ethanol production technologies, showing quantitatively the interrelations between the ethyl alcohol industry and the rest of the economy. I develop a simple, yet effective, model to study economic performance and examine the environmental-economic development tradeoff based on an interregional input-output system. I hypothesize that the adoption of the biotechnologically enhanced ethanol production technology provides greater output and employment and lower environmental and energy costs than more traditional technologies and, in contrast, that the implementation of the traditional technology alleviates income inequality by increasing the income received by households in economically deprived regions. / by Roberto Guerrero Compeán. / M.C.P.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-364). / The nation's current recession has strained the finances of local governments such that many cities with already delicate budgets have plunged into fiscal crisis. This dissertation examines three causes of fiscal crisis - a local government's dependence on the market, majoritarian tyranny within federalism, and local democracy failure. Since New York City's highly publicized board in 1975, 119 municipalities of all sizes have been assigned control boards, in which a state appointed team oversees the budgetary decisions of a municipality in fiscal emergency. This study analyzes how control boards address each cause of fiscal crisis. This research builds on the fiscal crisis literature to measure the fiscal impact of control boards. Evidence suggests that boards were implemented in most large cities with fiscal crisis and that those cities recover. However, crisis cities without control boards also improve. Regressions indicate that control boards in municipalities with populations below 25,000 are less successful. The control boards are not assigned to municipalities that most need intervention, and they do not improve fiscal outcomes more than similar cities. This dissertation explores the governance implications of control boards through a framework developed about International Monetary Fund stabilization teams. The literature suggests these institutions can bring technical expertise to ill-equipped governments; offer credibility to governments needing access to resources; and provide a scapegoat for unpopular policies. Conversely, disadvantages include diminished sovereignty; power to external political actors; favorable concessions to the private market; and uncertain benefits. / (cont.) Case studies of Miami and Washington, DC between 1995 and 2001 highlight the fiscal and local democracy benefits of control boards as well as their risk of exacerbating an intergovernmental political imbalance. State and local leaders set a cooperative tone in Miami that increased local buy-in and bolstered long-term success. The credibility of DC's board helped the city obtain resources from Congress, but the real and perceived threat to local democracy was much stronger in the District than Miami and exacerbated by the control board's expansive powers. Thus, controversy throughout DC's control board era distracted from the board's goals and reduced its long-term impact. / by Deborah Isadora Kobes. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 35). / This study evaluates the performance of low income housing subsidy programs currently operating in Chile. The use of detailed microdata allows a close assessment of the relationship between individual subsidy grants, characteristics of the units purchased and actual transaction prices. The study entails both the comparison between programs with different incentive frameworks, and the relative performance of each of these programs in a context of major increases in the levels of assistance provided. The evidence suggests that in most cases virtually the entire increase in the subsidy to the purchaser, which is intended to make housing more affordable, is translated into increased housing prices. In fact, in subsidized transactions between 2007 and 2009 the agreed purchase prices were almost entirely determined by the maximum subsidy amounts set by the housing authority. This occurred repeatedly in transactions performed through programs where the granted subsidy was virtually a 1 to 1 function of the agreed transaction price and where subsidy beneficiaries have little or no incentive to bargain. In such a framework, all the increases in subsidy levels that occurred in the period were translated into equivalent increases in prices with very limited improvements in the quality and location of the units purchased. On the contrary, prices tended to move much more closely with the unit's predicted price (determined by its actual characteristics) in less generous programs that provide lump sum transfers and where beneficiaries are responsible for paying larger proportions of the balance. However, even in these cases, up to 64 cents per dollar of housing subsidy are estimated to be translated directly into house price inflation. The estimated positive impact of subsidy amounts on prices of existing units is a form of wealth transfer that benefits current owners. Although the majority of today's sellers in this segment are low to middle income households that benefited from housing policy efforts in previous decades, these owners are certainly wealthier than current subsidy beneficiaries and also wealthier than other households still waiting to receive housing assistance. Such wealth transfers may be inappropriate, and undermine the declared goal of targeting housing assistance efforts on those who need it most. / by Slaven Antonio Razmilic Burgos. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-85). / by Daniel Benjamin Abramson. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-83). / This thesis examines how evolving norms of international climate change mitigation are translated into national forest governance policies and land management techniques in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The development of administrative mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) become a cultural script through which the institutions of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program "prepare" the post-colonial state to be a rational producer of avoided forest carbon emissions. The two actions-building the state and stabilizing a commodifiable carbon-occur unconsciously as a process Sheila Jasanoff calls "co-production," a dialectic in which efforts to change the natural order depend on unquestioned ideas about the social order, and visa versa. As this thesis shows, instrumental goals of making carbon governable in a country bearing the heavy legacy of Belgian colonialism and the scars of the largest regional war in recent African history, run a high risk of reproducing embedded inequities found at the local level. The impacts of global climate change are expected to have especially adverse affects on subsistence communities dependent on forest resources for their daily existence. If REDD architecture would live up to its stated goal of also improving livelihoods in the non-Annex I countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it must engage in a more overtly "coproductionist" politics of carbon management. This means developing overt mechanisms that provide more continuous interactions between different epistemic communities in the domestic REDD countries (international experts, national administrators and local communities), linking local level institutions upward with higher scales of administration in setting the rules for carbon management, as well as strengthening community control of resources so that the decision to participate in the provisioning of global public goods can be made with more autonomy. / by Ian P. Gray. / M.C.P.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 250-254. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1986. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH / Bibliography: leaves 109-113. / by Phyllis L. Robinson. / M.C.P.