Politics of Regional Governance
June 14, 2010
Getting neighboring regional governments to cooperate is no easy task. Most regions, for example, don’t have a centralized government—cities, counties, and districts are all controlled by separate politicians and institutions—and forcing communities to agree on issues such as pooling resources or transportation policy can seem next to impossible.
“The authority is all mixed up like the swirls of a marble cake,” says Elisabeth R. Gerber, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, who has been studying the interaction of such governments.
During the latest installment of the Harris School’s Urban Policy Initiative speaker series in early June, Gerber argued that its important to understand how the motivations and incentives of political actors can amplify—and possibly be used to solve—the daunting challenge of making and implementing policy across regional governments.
Her research uses data from the 2000 U.S. Census and found that some 75 percent of the America’s population lives within a “metropolitan statistical area” or MSA. An MSA is a geographical region that typically has one or more large cities at its core, which usually exert a lot of influence over the rest of the region. But Gerber said studying MSAs can be difficult since “governance is messy” within them.
Gerber said she has focused on how this messiness of regions can lead to inefficiencies. As one example, she noted that Montvale, New Jersey—a town of four square miles—owns five fire trucks. Although it could be more cost-effective to sell or lease the trucks to neighboring towns, cooperating with other areas could be politically difficult if there is not obvious benefit for both sides.
But Gerber said the key to making cooperation more palatable is to study the incentives of the political players and how political actors are held accountable. In one study, Gerber found that regional organizations charged with deciding how federal transportation dollars will be spent vary in their ability to craft regional policies depending on whether those serving in those organizations are appointed or elected. Gerber found that organizations dominated by appointed officials produce more cooperative transportation policies than those accountable to voters.
Her talk was followed by comments from a panel of University of Chicago professors: Lee Fennell, a professor at the Law School, and Eric Oliver, a professor of political science, moderated by the Harris School Assistant Professor Christopher Berry.
After hearing the dialogue between Gerber, the panel, and members of the audience, first-year MPP student Simone Weil said she was glad to see the Harris School “engage in the conversation about the challenges of regional planning.”
Weil also referenced the formation of the Chicago area’s own Go To 2040 regional plan, which has been drafted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. The plan, to be completed in October 2010, sets a direction for regional transportation, land use, energy, and telecommunications policy for the next 30 years.
She said Gerber’s lecture captured many of the obstacles that the Chicago region will soon face. “Our own region is in the process of developing a regional plan and although the development of the plan was difficult, its implementation, clearly, will be even more challenging”
By Lauren Shepherd
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