Environmental leadership : the discipline of green champions

Modern society's inertia is driving it towards an ever-expanding environmental footprint, a course that if unchecked will produce calamitous environmental outcomes. Avoiding this future requires increasing capacity for deep and durable change in society. Since existing approaches - e.g., science, education, policy, market incentives - have been unsuccessful at achieving this level of change, a key ingredient is apparently missing. Environmental leadership, which I define as the capacity of a human community to improve its future connection with and impact upon the environment, can be that catalyst of a more sustainable society. This thesis explores how to increase environmental leadership capacity by revealing effective environmental leadership strategy. Given pragmatic concerns with the limited power possessed by environmentalists, the inherently unstable nature of gains made through power, and unlikelihood of achieving deeper transformations through coercion, I explore leadership strategy for creating change beyond the extent of its authority and without imposing the government's coercive power. I had presumed three existing veins within leadership literature - Interpersonal Influence, Capacity-Building, and Contextual Design - would adequately explain environmental leadership strategy, with Interpersonal Influence being the primary mechanism. While leaders indeed acted in all three styles, Contextual Design instead emerged as a surprisingly key route to influence. Analysis of interviews with 32 environmental leaders revealed an important, previously underreported aspect to leadership actions. Leaders routinely amplified and institutionalized their leadership influence by designing and creating durable structures achieving four purposes - Supplying, Community-Building, Integrating, and Mirroring.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Lyddy, Christopher (Christopher James)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith Layzer.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/42267

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/42267