About the Project

A comparative instrument, built on nine cities across three continents.

Every place runs on a machinery most residents never see — the budget lines, the service routes, the discretionary calls made by people whose names don’t appear on ballots. JoAnna’s work is built on a simple premise: if you want to understand how a city actually functions, you have to watch it work under pressure.

It began with a simple, almost naive question: why do some local governments keep delivering when everything goes wrong, while others with similar resources struggle? Whether the answer lies in structure than in money or geography — in how rules, money, coordination and discretion are arranged — is what the fieldwork is built to find out.

The method is old-fashioned: show up, ask questions, read the documents, and compare. Nine cities. Three continents. Each chosen because it faces a different kind of pressure — growth, austerity, conflict, transition — and because no two share a governance tradition.

The same fieldwork produces two things: Load-Bearing, a narrative book for a general reader, and Governing Under Load, the research stream behind it. Both are rooted in the same conviction: that local government is where politics becomes real, and where most of the work of keeping a place together actually happens.

About JoAnna M. Male

She trained as a chemical engineer and spent years reading complex systems under strain.

JoAnna grew up in small-town Kansas, where at her high school graduation she was asked the standard question: who’s your role model? Frank R. Male, her oldest brother. It’s been a running joke since then — he still brings it up, half teasing, half touched. But the answer made sense. Watching him, she’d absorbed a particular pairing: a love of applied science, how the physical world works, alongside a curiosity about democratic life, how our lived-in world works.

So she went to college and declared both — chemical engineering and political science — a combination that made sense only when explained. A chemical engineering degree teaches you how systems behave, how processes flow, how to break a problem down and solve it. It’s a passport into the industries that run modern life: energy, pharma, food. She chose energy, the real engine behind everything else, because she wanted to understand how the world actually works before trying to change it.

But those industries don’t run on physics alone. They run on policy and regulation — so she learned that too: how rules are made, how incentives shape behavior, how a regulation becomes something an operator can actually carry out in the field. Her early career became a kind of two-way bridge, paper to field and field to paper, and in at least one case, that bridge held: real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, not just a report recommending it.

The first weeks of fieldwork for this project were the same instinct turned on something new — arriving somewhere ordinary and suddenly seeing it differently, the way you notice where a process bottlenecks once someone points at the right valve. It has turned out to be its own kind of thrill: a place she thought she half-understood, revealing an entire system underneath she’d never had the reason to look for.

For now, she’s set the rest of her working life aside to keep doing exactly that, one city at a time. She is drawn to the breadcrumbs of a system at work — the permit taped to the construction barrier, the volunteer who keeps showing up, the meeting where a routine vote turns out not to be. Most systems are invisible until they’re strained. She’s learned to watch closely enough to see them anyway.