Reflection Paper: City of Chelsea, Massachusetts

Reflection Paper: City of Chelsea, Massachusetts

In most incidents, intergovernmental relations deal with horizontal relationships between local authorities and authorities that might be offering services in the geographical area. It is evident that the consultation between national and local government helped come up with laws that aimed at making the City of Chelsea pass climatic roadmap law. The city needs to ensure that greenhouse gas emitted to the environment is reduced by 2030 and comply with the 2015 Paris agreement by 2050 (Llanto, 2016). Basically, with the intergovernmental relationship, the City of Chelsea was able to develop policies that would help the city experience sustainable transition (Runhaar et al., 2018). The truth is that intergovernmental relations played a key role in ensuring the execution of policies through effective flow communication, which helped the City of Chelsea develop a way to make it respond to change in the climate. In addition, the intergovernmental relations helped the city of Chelsea develop a clear pathway that enabled creating a network of knowledge to pursue policy goals within a new framework that aimed to make sure that by 2050 GHG emissions would be zero.

In addition, based on the concept and sustainability, it is evident that IGR facilitates collaboration between government orders. It is true that the use of IGR helps ensure that the government avoids confusion, duplication of service delivery, and policymakers (Goelzhauser & Konisky, 2020). With all this core value, the City of Chelsea was able to develop innovative implementation, thus avoiding a rise in emission and ensuring no additional delays.

Furthermore, with the extensive use of IGR, several laws were passed that helped set up a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is important because it made Chelsea more of a leader than a follower regarding climate change. On the other hand, when Chelsea needed guidance on ensuring that GHG emission is reduced by 2030, it used IGR with the federal government to establish a greenhouse gas roadmap law.

References

Goelzhauser, G., & Konisky, D. M. (2020). The state of American federalism 2019–2020: Polarized and punitive intergovernmental relations. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 50(3), 311-343.

Llanto, G. M. (2016). The assignment of functions and intergovernmental fiscal relations in the Philippines 20 years after decentralization. Philippine Review of Economics, 49(1), 37-80.

Runhaar, H., Wilk, B., Persson, Å., Uittenbroek, C., & Wamsler, C. (2018). Mainstreaming climate adaptation: taking stock about “what works” from empirical research worldwide. Regional environmental change, 18(4), 1201-1210.