Quasi-Governmental Organization Under Pressure: The Connecticut Green Bank's Response to a Budget Shock

Numerous barriers interfere with achieving effective outcomes of climate adaptation and mitigation governance. In the United States, the politicization of climate change and the long-standing susceptibility of long-term projects to politicians' short-term budgetary incentives both heighten the difficulties for effective climate change governance. U.S. quasi-governmental organizations (QGOs) were traditionally created to address several of these barriers in non-climate change domains. The properties of QGOs that allow these organizations to address governance barriers may also allow them to cope with shocks more easily than traditional government agencies. Green banks are an emerging and growing form of dedicated climate change governance in the United States. We use the organizational ambidexterity (OA) framework to evaluate the case of the quasi-governmental Connecticut Green Bank (CGB)'s adaptation to a 2017 state-instigated budget shock. The OA framework is useful for this case study given its emphasis on managerial response to organizational survival threats. We find that the CGB adapted financially to the shock, as a result of mission and financial drift away from Connecticut state control and policy. The CGB's adaptation to the shock hinged on its quasi-governmental status—which allowed it to create a nonprofit organization, Inclusive Prosperity Capital (IPC), and pursue activities to render both entities financially and operationally self-sufficient. We characterize the CGB's adaptive response as hybrid, structural-cyclical, ambidexterity. Our study provides the first empirical description of ambidexterity in the quasi-governmental space and builds evidence for the utility of applying hybrid ambidexterity theory in the climate change domain. The analysis carries implications for a wide array of public and private organizations that must adapt to survival threats by balancing activities that affect short- and long-term viability within the context of their mission orientation.