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How Can We Better Study the Links between Regional Governance and Public Service Outcomes? Governance Topologies in Metropolitan Public Transportation Systems
Abstract
Metropolitan public transportation systems vary in their performance and governance, and evidence suggests linkages between these. However, such linkages remain largely untested due to the complexity of governance and the absence of reliable and valid measures of it. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding metropolitan public transportation system governance using the familiar concepts of polycentricity and fragmentation. We introduce the novel concept of governance topology to parse the complexity of the many organizational arrangements and interorganizational relationships that comprise metropolitan governance. We then propose a method of measurement using a concentration index, and apply it to the Chicagoland region.
... A robust economy generates employment, attracts investment, and fosters innovation [109]. Effective governance ensures fair resource distribution and transparent decision-making, benefiting businesses and communities [110]. The integration of these pillars with transportation enhances urban mobility, supports economic activities, and reduces environmental impact [111,112]. ...
This study delves into the pivotal role that indicators play in designing, assessing, and guiding policies for sustainable urban development. Indicators, encompassing both quantitative and qualitative measures, serve as essential tools in evaluating efforts toward sustainable development, providing a practical and objective means of understanding the complex urban environment. The lack of a robust database is identified as a hindrance to monitoring sustainable development progress, underscoring the importance of comprehensive indicators. The study employs a bibliometric literature review methodology, focusing on smart city and sustainability indicators (SSCI) from 2015 to 2022. A total of 818 articles were narrowed down to 191 through rigorous criteria. The study showcases a growing interest in this field, with the number of articles published experiencing a remarkable 288% increase from 2015 to 2022. China emerges as a focal point, leading in both article production and citations, emphasizing its commitment to sustainable development and smart city initiatives. The keywords "sustainable development", "sustainability" and “urban development” had the most occurrences in text analysis. We found three different clusters with k-means analysis, and the circular economy indicators were the most representative category. In conclusion, the study underscores the holistic vision of SSCI in the current scenario, balancing technology and sustainability to improve urban quality of life while safeguarding the planet. Encouraging further research into integrating resilience-focused indicators and innovative solutions is crucial for enhancing sustainable urban development and informing policy decisions.
Planning struggles with the tension between professional expertise and public voice. The approaching 75th anniversary of Philip Selznick's classic, TVA and the Grass Roots, is an apt time to revisit that tension. In Selznick's analysis, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a modernist institution aligning with local agricultural elites at the expense of vulnerable Black and poor farmers. He coined the term ‘informal co-optation’ to characterize TVA's affiliation with the powerful. We bring renewed attention to informal co-optation and the institutional aspects of engagement by examining how Selznick's analysis was received contemporaneously, and then considering recent scholarship and the current implications of Selznick's work.
The purpose of this article is to analyse quality attributes of regional public transport and their influence on modal choice, demand, and customer satisfaction through a literature review. The review is based on a working definition of regional public transport with boundaries toward local as well as interregional public transport: Regional public transport (i) targets passengers travelling between separate urban areas or to rural areas and (ii) a majority of the trips are made on a regular basis. Our results suggest that preferences of regional travellers mainly conform to the preferences of local travellers, but some important differences have been revealed. Most notably, on-board comfort is a higher priority for regional travellers and is increasingly important with longer travel times. Network coverage and coordination are also more prominent features of regional public transport, presumably due to the more dispersed nature of regional public transport networks. These differences, and the fact that the prerequisites for regional public transport are in general substantially different compared to local and interregional public transport, support continued use of this categorisation in public transport research. We also conclude that there is a requirement for more knowledge about the specifics of regional public transport, as public transport research, thus far, has been largely focused on local travel. Research areas of particular interest are on-board comfort, operational aspects, travel time improvements, how the environmental impact of public transport services affects modal choice, and the influence of trip length on passenger preferences.
The United States is a nation of local governments. The growth in the number of local governments over the last sixty years has led many to ask whether the current fragmented arrangement is ideal or whether fewer local governments are preferred. This article explains the theoretical arguments on both sides, paying close attention to horizontal and vertical fragmentation. The empirical evidence on the effects of local government fragmentation is examined in three policy areas: public expenditures/revenues, public employment, and economic growth.
en The Ecology of Games approach to examining complex governance systems in democratic societies has been recently refurbished to infuse renewed vitality in the analysis of institutions and collective action in polycentric governance systems. This opening article to the special issue on the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT) will discuss the main component elements of the theory, as well as recently produced empirical advances that test and extend it. The article is structured in three sections. The first section describes the EGT as a theory of polycentricity and explains why it is critical to study both the structure and function of polycentric governance systems, including collaboration among policy stakeholders, learning about problems, and equitably distributing the resources generated by policy interactions. The second section reviews empirical evidence that examine structure and function in polycentric systems, including their coevolution. Finally, the third section will provide insights on future research needs to strengthen this newly developed theory of polycentricity.
Abstract
zh 生态博弈方法主要研究民主社会中复杂的治理体系，而近来对该方法的革新，为分析多中心治理体系中的制度和集体行动注入了新的活力。作为本期生态博弈理论（EGT）特刊的开篇文章，本文将讨论该理论的主要组成部分，以及近来在检验和拓展该理论时的实证研究进展。本文分为三个部分。第一部分把EGT描述为多中心理论，并解释为什么研究多中心治理体系的结构和功能至关重要，在此之中，我们也探讨了政策利益相关者之间的合作、对政策问题的学习以及政策互动过程中产生的资源公平分配。第二部分回顾了检验多中心体系的结构和功能的实证证据，这其中包括了结构和功能协同进化的实证研究。最后，第三部分将提供我们对未来研究需求的深入见解，进以巩固最新发展的多中心理论。
For decades, institutional scholars have embraced the concept of polycentricity as a way to describe systems of governance with multiple, overlapping centers of authority. However, intellectual progress on polycentricity has been constrained by inconsistent conceptual measurement, an overemphasis on small‐n versus large‐n research designs, a lack of attention to the variation in actors and authorities across policy‐specific issues, and unrefined methods of data analyses. This article offers a new path forward by applying a semiautomated approach to conduct a comparative analysis of polycentricity within and between 11 oil and gas regulations in Colorado, USA. Drawing lessons from the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework and network analyses, dyadic network relations between actors and rules were used to describe the polycentric structure of Colorado's oil and gas regulations. The polycentric structure that emerges features core and peripheral actors who vary in their associations to rules and imperatives (i.e., deontics). The conclusion presents an agenda for advancing knowledge of polycentricity and institutional design using these conceptual and methodological foundations.
The literature on metropolitan governance is replete with examples of collaborative efforts that have fallen short of expectations and grim prognoses of the potential for voluntary forms of regional governance. This article analyzes something often sought, and rarely found, in American metropolitan politics: successful, effective, and sustained interjurisdictional and interagency cooperation. TRANSCOM, a non-profit transportation organization, stands out as an instance of successful collective cooperation. Operating behind the scenes in one of the world’s most politically fragmented metropolitan areas, its secret has been (a) engaging and building upon a clear and focused mission; (b) demonstrating organizational legitimacy by providing tangible benefits to members; (c) executing its mission without impinging on members’ organizational autonomy; (d) creatively tapping into available resources; (e) sustaining buy-in by developing strong relationships with members; and (f) seeking out champions and empowering decisive and strategic leadership.
Polycentricity is a fundamental concept in commons scholarship that connotes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. If the decision-making centers take each other into account in competitive and cooperative relationships and have recourse to conflict resolution mechanisms, they may be regarded as a polycentric governance system. In the context of natural resource governance, commons scholars have ascribed a number of advantages to polycentric governance systems, most notably enhanced adaptive capacity, provision of good institutional fit for natural resource systems, and mitigation of risk on account of redundant governance actors and institutions. Despite the popularity of the concept, systematic development of polycentricity, including its posited advantages, is lacking in the commons literature. To build greater clarity and specificity around the concept, we develop a theoretical model of a polycentric governance system with a focus on the features necessary or conducive for achieving the functioning predicted by commons scholars. The model is comprised of attributes, which constitute the definitional elements, and enabling conditions, which specify additional institutional features for achieving functionality in the commons. The model we propose takes the concept a step further toward specificity without sacrificing the generality necessary for contextual application and further development.
The creation of an efficient public transport system requires collaborations between
formal independent organizations. This paper examines collaborations between public and private
organizations and passengers, with the aim of contributing to the conceptual understanding of
collaborations on public transport. The study begins by describing previous research on collaboration
in the public transport area and in other research fields analytically relevant for public transport.
Accordingly, collaboration is defined as an attempt to overcome problems with collective action
and to transform a situation in which the various organizations operate independently into a
situation where they act in concert to achieve shared objectives. The collaboration process involves
the establishment of joint rules and structures that govern the relationship and behavior of the
organizations. According to this definition, collaboration is a more sophisticated form of collective
action than is indicated by terms such as “co-operation” or “coordination”. Fully-functioning
collaboration can be described as a form of “co-action”, as opposed to “individual action”. In co-action,
formal independent organizations together reap the benefits of working together and achieve more
than if they had acted alone. Co-action can be regarded as a gradual trust-building process that
requires qualities such as mutual confidence, an understanding of other organizations’ motivations,
and joint problem formulation.
Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and Zurich – the largest cities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – have significantly reduced the car share of trips over the past 25 years in spite of high motorisation rates. The key to their success has been a coordinated package of mutually reinforcing transport and land-use policies that have made car use slower, less convenient, and more costly, while increasing the safety, convenience, and feasibility of walking, cycling, and public transport. The mix of policies implemented in each city has been somewhat different. The German cities have done far more to promote cycling, while Zurich and Vienna offer more public transport service per capita at lower fares. All five of the cities have implemented roughly the same policies to promote walking, foster compact mixed-use development, and discourage car use. Of the car-restrictive policies, parking management has been by far the most important. The five case study cities demonstrate that it is possible to reduce car dependence even in affluent societies with high levels of car ownership and high expectations for quality of travel.
Insufficient federal transportation funds have forced counties and cities to propose local taxes to fund new transportation, meaning poor coordination across jurisdictions. This article examines similar taxes conducted multi-jurisdictionally as a potential solution. This study uses archival evidence, legal statutes, and interviews to understand how a seven-county Bay Area proposal was put together, and how this process compared with what is known about local option tax processes. It concludes that this multi-jurisdictional funding measure shared a similar process to single-county ones, but lacked blanket authorization for a regional agency to place the proposal on the ballot, which made the process overly dependent on a single well-connected politician to put it together. This makes it hard to propose a regional process with great frequency, and gives the politician great influence over the projects selected. The study concludes with recommendations to facilitate institutionalization and greater use of multi-jurisdictional funding mechanisms.
Empirical and theoretical research on government competition and collaboration identifies several important macro-level characteristics that can affect these forms of interaction between local governments within the same large jurisdiction. These characteristics are fragmentation of governments, fiscal dispersion of governments, sorting of population by governments, and decentralized fiscal responsibility between state and local governments. This study presents indices to measure these characteristics and examines how metropolitan regions in the United States with populations greater than one million are distributed on these indices. The study also examines how these regions compare on conditions that are likely to motivate sales tax competition between municipal governments.
The integration of transit needs into transit accessibility indexing is important for evaluating existing transportation systems and service gaps and for identifying priority areas for investments in transportation infrastructure. This study detailed an indexing model for accessibility of transit need and focused on the necessity of evaluating transit needs and transit accessibility simultaneously. A need index was developed to identify areas in high need of public transit services from economic and sociodemographic information, and a composite accessibility index was developed to identify levels of access to transit services and shortcomings in providing service. The need for transit service was then modeled as the lack of transit accessibility, and the model correlated different access indicators with their ability to predict transit service need. This model mapped areas with different levels of transit accessibility and transit needs by using a single score, which may be easily interpreted by planners who examine transit equity. The model was applied to the city of Meriden, Connecticut, and results were compared with a general approach for consistency and effectiveness. The usefulness of the model was also highlighted through a representative example of the model's application.
A metropolitan region does not have formal institutional structures such as nations, states, and cities, but it is a system that can be conceptualized and studied as a whole. The study of metropolitan areas too often ignores the dynamic relationship sat the intersection of state and local governments. This study suggests a two-dimensional typology of governance in metropolitan regions. The authors found that governance affects the long-term competitiveness of the metropolitan economy. Governance does not determine economic outcomes but reduces the ability to adapt. The worst combination for metropolitan competitiveness is decentralization within regions where there is a centralized state government.
This study uses multiple measures of fragmentation and decentralization to assess the effects of these conditions on total local spending in 126 metropolitan regions and 538 counties in the same regions in 2002. The measures are derived from a recognized scheme that distinguishes among total, horizontal, and vertical dimensions of these conditions, and the models control for other causes of total local spending, including sprawl and interlocal spending. The study finds support for the claim that total spending by local governments is higher in regions and counties with more single purpose governments (vertical fragmentation), but also jurisdictions where a greater percentage of spending is done by counties (centralization). Findings also vary by unit of analysis and type of special purpose government, which suggests that the effects of governing structure are not as straightforward as theory suggests.
The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non-ad hoc analogies between different types of self-organizing complex social systems.
Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public
administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks,
research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for
collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that
encompass a larger system context, a collaborative governance regime, and its internal
collaborative dynamics and actions that can generate impacts and adaptations across the
systems. The framework provides a broad conceptual map for situating and exploring
components of cross-boundary governance systems that range from policy or programbased
intergovernmental cooperation to place-based regional collaboration with
nongovernmental stakeholders to public-private partnerships. The framework integrates
knowledge about individual incentives and barriers to collection action, collaborative social
learning and conflict resolution processes, and institutional arrangements for cross-boundary
collaboration. It is presented as a general framework that might be applied to analyses at
different scales, in different policy arenas, and varying levels of complexity. The article also
offers 10 propositions about the dynamic interactions among components within the
framework and concludes with a discussion about the implications of the framework for
theory, research, evaluation, and practice.
Transportation governance is an understudied topic, despite its potential to have significant influences on the quality of transit service, and integration of services across transit agencies. Past research has usually tackled this topic obliquely, or through studies focused on a single region or multiple regions in a single state. The present study builds on this foundation through the systemic analysis of data measuring jurisdictional fragmentation and cross-jurisdictional formal institutions facilitating ties across transit agency and local government jurisdictional boundaries (defined here as regionalization), for example, via state government involvement, multi-jurisdictional organizations, multi-jurisdictional funding, shared board memberships across agencies (conjunctions) and interagency agreements. The authors use comparative case study analysis to examine four highly fragmented metropolitan statistical areas, two with strong cross-jurisdictional institutions, and two where such institutions are comparatively weak, or nonexistent. The objective is to use a cohesive research strategy for measuring different cross-jurisdictional, regionalizing governance strategies with a single indexed measure, and trace narratively how differences in the indexed measure and the institutions it represents correspond to differences in transit system outcomes.
The widespread proliferation of special districts and their role in producing and delivering public goods and services has been well documented. Each new entity further fragments government authority, and thus their autonomy is a critical determinant of how local governance systems function. Existing theories of special district autonomy emphasize formal institutional attributes such as election structure and state restrictions. We argue that this approach does not fully incorporate how relational dynamics such as functional interdependence, interest alignment, and social capital affect how special districts fit within regional polycentric governance systems. We propose a Network Autonomy Framework for local governments that focuses on relational dynamics between co-located1 governments and demonstrate an example of how this framework can be applied to a metropolitan region. By understanding how co-located governments relate to one another, we can gain a deeper understanding of special districts’ role in local governance systems and advance propositions as to how they will affect a variety of local policy outcomes.
The mismatch between region-level goal setting and the local-level implementation can hamper regional smart growth efforts. This paper studies this conundrum in California, where state law requires metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to develop regional land use plans for reducing automobile-focused development and transportation-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but gives MPOs no authority over local land use for plan implementation. Unable to compel local development decisions, MPOs instead might use information to nudge cities and counties toward smarter growth. However, we find that California MPOs have uneven access to quality land-use information and that they seldom use it to gauge or nudge local smart growth. Findings support concerns that, absent stronger state or regional powers over land use, California MPOs may not succeed in advancing smart growth under state law SB 375. Structural changes are proposed for bridging the disconnect between regional planning and local land use control.
In From Mobility to Accessibility, an expert team of researchers flips the tables on the standard models for evaluating regional transportation performance. Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, and Louis A. Merlin argue for an "accessibility shift" whereby transportation planning, and the transportation dimensions of land-use planning, would be based on people's ability to reach destinations, rather than on their ability to travel fast.
Existing models for planning and evaluating transportation, which have taken vehicle speeds as the most important measure, would make sense if movement were the purpose of transportation. But it is the ability to reach destinations, not movement per se, that people seek from their transportation systems. While the concept of accessibility has been around for the better part of a century, From Mobility to Accessibility shows that the accessibility shift is compelled by the fundamental purpose of transportation. The book argues that the shift would be transformative to the practice of both transportation and land-use planning but is impeded by many conceptual obstacles regarding the nature of accessibility and its potential for guiding development of the built environment. By redefining success in transportation, the book provides city planners, decisionmakers, and scholars a path to reforming the practice of transportation and land-use planning in modern cities and metropolitan areas.
The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social–relational ties across organizational boundaries. However, jurisdictional fragmentation and increased reliance on private contractors in local public service delivery foster another source of network connectivity—shared personnel who work for multiple service providers. Drawing upon novel data of organizational personnel from more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in the Houston metro area in the state of Texas (United States), we examine how managerial, technical, and financial service delivery personnel connect otherwise independent organizations. We find that districts regulated by a common groundwater management agency and districts which contract with one another are both more likely to share technical and managerial personnel. By studying special districts that have overlapping personnel, we broaden the scope of the EoG framework to include additional layers of governance network complexity. As individual bureaucrats and service professionals play a key role in information transfer and innovation diffusion across organizations, shared personnel networks merit consideration as a mechanism for coordination and collective problem solving in fragmented urban systems.
This paper discusses definitions that have been developed and used in the study of polycentric governance. It offers conceptual refinements with the aim of reducing fuzziness, showing challenges of operationalization and application to an empirical setting—in other words, analyzing governance arrangements through the polycentricity lens. One defining element of polycentricity is the presence of “multiple decision‐making centers.” This paper shows that this multiplicity is specific to the good/problem in focus, the center's tasks/responsibilities, the level in focus and analytical system boundaries. Functional overlapping among those centers is required to consider centers forming one system in relation to a good. These specificities should be examined for comparisons on polycentricity influencing the functioning of systems. The paper applies those conceptual refinements to the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in Berlin and Hamburg. It characterizes the two cases in terms of their polycentricity. It compares their functioning so far and how the latter relates to interactions and social interrelations. The polycentricity lens illuminates important features and differences: given an overall multiplicity of centers and a similar rule setting in both cities, the differences in the distribution of responsibilities and social interrelations led to a faster but less integrated implementation in Hamburg than in Berlin. The application of the proposed refinements yields insights into further work to be done in favor of theory‐building on the functioning of polycentric governance systems.
Between 1990 and 2000, transit patronage increased by around 7% in the United States, but there has been wide variation around this mean. Most research attributes variation in ridership change to a combination of socioeconomic and land use factors, which are beyond a transit agency's control, and service and fare policy decisions, which are within an agency's control. A study built on this earlier work by examining ridership change at the metropolitan scale for all metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States that had more than 500,000 people at the time of the 2000 census. The study incorporates several measures of service quality in order to evaluate the relative efficacy of policy decisions about service coverage, frequency, and orientation (central business district radial versus multidestination system orientation). The multivariate analysis shows that transit is growing most rapidly in the nontraditional markets of the West but that much of the regional variation is a function of the particular service coverage, frequency, and orientation decisions made by transit agencies in this region. Service coverage and frequency are the most powerful explanatory variables for variation in ridership change among MSAs with 1 million to 5 million people, whereas a multidestination service orientation is the most important explanation for variation in ridership change among MSAs with 500,000 to 1 million people.
Because of the stagnation of federal money for new transportation infrastructure, local jurisdictions have increasingly found the need to fund capital projects themselves through transportation voter initiatives, known as local option taxes. Localized funding decisions make coordination across jurisdictions more difficult despite growing needs to solve regional problems, such as air quality, economic growth, and transport of the economically disadvantaged. In an effort to self-finance new projects while building an integrated regional system, some regions have taken the ambitious step of developing multijurisdictional self-help taxes and asking voters across multiple counties to support their proposals. However, few states authorize such taxes, and in some cases, advocates have had to lobby for legislative permission to hold a referendum. Although local obstacles are significant, legislative ones may stop such proposals before they can even begin. This study looks at seven cases that have occurred in four regions since 1990. Using interviews and archival evidence, this study examined how state-authorizing legislation and other factors shaped each process. The study finds that restrictive legislation can be problematic, although the need for new legislation makes the process cumbersome and difficult to repeat. Conversely, preauthorization using permissive language for particular factors-such as the tax rate, the timing and election cycle, the jurisdictions to be included, and the rules for selecting projects-is particularly important to ensuring that the process can adapt to local politics and changing circumstances. This approach can lift a significant obstacle to the use of multijurisdictional option tax processes as a way to fund regional transportation on a more regular basis.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: There are more than 400 U.S. metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseeing multiple transportation projects totaling billions of dollars, yet these crucial organizations and their history and current role are generally unknown or confusing to many planning practitioners and scholars. MPOs face major challenges in developing meaningful long-range regional transportation plans, challenges rooted in their history that planners should understand as they grapple with metropolitan planning efforts. MPOs may approve projects and their funding, but disparate agencies and often competitive local governments control budgets and actually build projects. MPOs, moreover, do not fully represent all regional interests and have no control over the local land use decisions that would support less autocentric communities and human-powered modes. I provide a metareview of the history of regional transportation planning and the MPOs responsible for it, describing U.S. metropolitan transportation planning from the early 20th century. Federal legislation in the 1960s first suggested a regional forum for conversations about metropolitan transportation. Federal legislation in subsequent decades made incremental if incomplete progress toward creating a meaningful regional forum, adapting institutions and practices to increase stakeholder involvement as well as the scope of transport planning, yet MPOs have multiple limitations that planners can address.
Takeaway for practice: History suggests that MPOs can be a force for regional change. Planners and policymakers could anchor future reforms to MPOs’ existing legal and administrative frameworks. Planners should revisit the membership and voting structures of MPO boards to ensure better stakeholder representation and permit some MPOs to generate and direct transportation funds at the local level.
This paper analyzes how public transport planning is managed in institutional contexts where governance is spread across local and regional scales. The paper sheds light on two facets of the relationship between local and regional government: first, the decision-making process regarding where to provide public transport services and at what level, and second, integration of public transport with land use planning. An analytical matrix is used to cross-reference the roles of formal institutions (governance established in law) and informal institutions (governance not established in law) against local and regional responsibilities for public transport and land use. Analysis of the interplay between these three axes (formal/informal, local/regional, public transport/land use) reveals how informal institutions help regional and local authorities to negotiate the constraints of formal, statutory institutions and help to “oil the wheels” of delivering measures and policies that make public transport work as a well-functioning system. However, informal institutions clearly have their limits, in the paper exemplified by the remaining challenges to integrate regional public transport and local land use planning. An identified challenge is that, by their very nature, informal institutions are difficult to influence or modify, therefore relying on them to fill gaps in formal institutional responsibilities may be a risky strategy when unpopular decisions are made.
For many observers, a large number of governments in a metropolitan area is thought to equate to “fragmentation,” and fragmentation, to ineffective organization and poor performance. Other observers find a large number of local governments to mean competition and consequent pressures for efficiency. The number of local governments, however, is only one dimension of the structure of a metropolitan area. We identify and measure key structural characteristics of “fragmented ” metropolitan areas, employing a comparative study of two metropolitan city-counties: St. Louis Cityand County, Missouri, and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania. We argue that these areas, with their many units of local government, “work” by means of integrating structures built by local governments together with county and state governments. Counties, in particular, are a useful focus for study of metropolitan relationships because they often provide the institutional frame within which integrating structures are built.
Recent empirical research points toward a reassessment of the effects of complex patterns of local government in metropolitan areas. As research increasingly discloses positive relationships between (1) indicators of jurisdictional fragmentation and complexity and (2) indicators of efficiency in service provision and production, it becomes more important to explain, in a functional sense, how a complex metropolitan order is able to produce relatively good results. This article first considers two broad approaches to understanding metropolitan complexity—exit and voice—and argues that citizen voice must be the principal mechanism of complex metropolitan governance A case study of St. Louis County, Missouri, is then used to explore the various processes by which citizen voice may contribute to the organization and governance of a metropolitan county. Citizen voice is linked to public entrepreneurship and, thereby, to various efficiency-inducing properties that emerge within a complex metropolitan order.
Inadequate organization of public transport services in urban areas, particularly in the large ones, is one of the major reasons for the unsatisfactory level of service and economic problems of the operating companies. Despite the current trend toward mergers of transit operators into large public agencies, the services in most cities remain fragmented in various degrees; integration is often not in sight due to organizational problems which appear insurmountable. Losses to the users, the operators, and the city from this situation are often very significant. This article briefly analyzes the reasons for this situation, explores its consequences and their importance. A number of solutions for the problem are possible, but none of them is simple and easy to achieve. The federation of transit organizations introduced recently in Hamburg, Germ any, has proved to be so successful that it has received wide attention in international professional circles. This solution therefore deserves a careful study by transit operators as well as government officials of metropolitan areas in the United States and other countries.
Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.
This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.
Although the spatial structure of employment in large US metropolitan regions is a well-researched topic, few studies focus on medium-sized and small US metropolitan regions. Consequently, there is no overall typology relating small-to-medium urban form to employment distribution. We address this gap by investigating the spatial structure of employment in 356 metropolitan regions. We conceptualize six typologies based on three categories that have overlapping properties: “monocentricity,” “polycentricity,” and “generalized dispersion.” The study has three main findings. First, the three types of urban form that we identify as “hybrid” outnumber the three “pure” types by almost four to one. Second, job dispersion is a dominant characteristic in almost 70% of all metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) (including the hybrid types), and polycentricity (56.7% of MSAs) is somewhat more common than monocentricity. Third, there is a strong relationship between population size and density. The population of medium-sized metropolitan areas is generally more dispersed than that of small and large metropolitan areas. Polycentricy emerges mostly in large metropolitan regions, while monocentrity is found in both small and large metropolitan regions.
A highly fragmented system of local governance represents a market-like arrangement in which competition among service providers benefits citizen-consumers by improving the efficiency of local public service delivery. Yet, the local public market can also fail, producing negative outcomes for some communities and their residents. Because fragmentation can have differential impacts on the welfare of different groups of citizens—benefiting others and harming some—the organization of the local public sector raises important equity questions. This research focuses on the negative outcomes or externalities generated by local government fragmentation, specifically urban sprawl and spatial economic segregation. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that the design of the local public sector structure involves a trade-off between efficiency and equity.
More than twenty years of case study research have produced a rich theoretical framework for understanding the outcomes that can be achieved through effective collaborative planning and the starting conditions, process characteristics, and participant attributes and behaviors that can facilitate achieving those outcomes. Multivariate modeling of collaborative development of draft long-range transportation plans by the technical advisory committees of 88 U. S. metropolitan planning organizations supports nearly all of the hypotheses that have emerged from this case study literature. In this context, however, while consensus building best practices contribute significantly to success, formal consensus-based decision making emerges as not critical.
Though created in 1959, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations has received "comparatively little attention" in professional literature. Professor Wright here outlines several unique structural characteristics of the ACIR and examines the general policy orientation which the Commission has developed. With the normal reticence of Congress to create permanent commissions, a permanent bipartisan commission with an advisory function is something of a rarity; yet, the author indicates, it was congressional rather than executive initiative that led to its creation. Though "the Commission has not occupied a position of high significance or access to the President," the ACIR and its extremely productive staff have achieved a highly regarded position on the national-state-local scene. The author summarizes the policy orientation and working assumption contained in the Commission's publications, and concludes that it will have an increasing impact on efforts to perfect the federal system.
Adaptive governance focuses our attention on the relationships between science and management, whereby the so-called ‘gaps’ between these groups are seen to hinder effective adaptive responses to biophysical change. Yet the relationships between science and governance, knowledge and action, remain under theorized in discussions of adaptive governance, which largely focuses on abstract design principles or preferred institutional arrangements. In contrast, the metaphor of co-production highlights the social and political processes through which science, policy, and practice co-evolve. Co-production is invoked as a normative goal (Mitchell et al., 2004) and analytical lens (0260 and 0265), both of which provide useful insight into the processes underpinning adaptive governance. This paper builds on and integrates these disparate views to reconceptualize adaptive governance as a process of co-production. I outline an alternative conceptual framing, ‘co-productive governance’, that articulates the context, knowledge, process, and vision of governance. I explore these ideas through two cases of connectivity conservation, which draws on conservation science to promote collaborative cross-scale governance. This analysis highlights the ways in which the different contexts of these cases produced very different framings and responses to the same propositions of science and governance. Drawing on theoretical and empirical material, co-productive governance moves beyond long standing debates that institutions can be rationally crafted or must emerge from context resituate adaptive governance in a more critical and contextualized space. This reframing focuses on the process of governance through an explicit consideration of how normative considerations shape the interactions between knowledge and power, science and governance.
A decade ago, political scientists were deploring the “lost world of municipal government” and calling for systematic studies of municipal life which emphasized the political, rather than the administrative, side of urban political life. In recent years, this demand has been generously answered and urban politics is becoming one of the most richly plowed fields of political research. In terms originally introduced by David Easton, political scientists have long been concerned with inputs, but more recently they have focused their attention on other system variables, particularly the political culture and policy outputs of municipal governments.
The present paper will treat two policy outputs, taxation and expenditure levels of cities, as dependent variables. We will relate these policy choices to socio-economic characteristics of cities and to structural characteristics of their governments. Our central research concern is to examine the impact of political structures, reformed and unreformed, on policy-making in American cities.
The fundamental value underlying the design of a fragmented system of local governance is consumer sovereignty. This system functions as a market-like arrangement providing citizen-consumers a choice of jurisdictions that offer different bundles of public services and taxes. However, the same choice also can facilitate class-based population sorting, creating regions where fiscally wealthy jurisdictions coexist with impoverished ones. Some argue that the public market enhances the power of all consumers, whether poor or rich. Even if the poor are concentrated in some jurisdictions, they can exercise their voice to ensure that their government responds to their service needs. But does the voice of the poor matter as much as the voice of the rich in determining service levels in the local public market? Comparing the budgetary choices in poor and affluent municipalities, this article shows that in highly fragmented regions, some municipal services are provided the least in communities where they are needed the most.
Although performance management processes are widely assumed to be beneficial in improving organizational performance in the public sector, there is insufficient empirical evidence to back this claim. In this article, the authors examine the impact of performance management practices on organizational effectiveness in a particular segment of the public transit industry in the United States. The analysis utilizes original survey data on performance management practices comprising both strategy formulation and performance measurement in 88 small and medium‐sized local transit agencies in conjunction with comparative outcome data drawn from the National Transit Database maintained by the Federal Transit Administration. The results provide evidence that more extensive use of performance management practices does in fact contribute to increased effectiveness in this segment of the transit industry.
This article discusses the common-pool problems that arise when multiple territorially overlapping governments share the authority to provide services and levy taxes in a common geographic area. Contrary to the traditional Tiebout model in which increasing the number of competing governments improves efficiency, I argue that increasing the number of overlapping governments results in “overfishing” from the shared tax base. I test the model empirically using data from U.S. counties and find a strong positive relationship between the number of overlapping jurisdictions and the size of the local public sector. Substantively, the “overlap effect” amounts to roughly 10% of local revenue.
For decades a debate has lingered about the ramifications of local government fragmentation, and the arguments traditionally are based on political ideologies and impressionistic views rather than on empirical analysis. In this empirical study, a fiscal perspective is added to the issue. A fragmentation measure, based on the dispersion of expenditures among local governments, is used to examine the relationship between fragmentation and the cost of government in Illinois, including the very fragmented Chicago metropolitan region. The results indicate a significant positive relationship between fragmentation and the cost of government.
This paper concerns steering aspects in the governance context of public transport. Various theoretical views of steering have been presented over the years, and it has been argued that a multiple-principal context often leads to fragmented steering. The paper aims to identify steering culture models found among principals operating in the same public transport context, and to explain how a successful procurement outcome is possible, despite the hybrid of steering cultures. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of a Swedish county's planning process that resulted in a very successful procurement outcome that met high environmental and safety standards at a relatively low cost. This procurement was seen as a triumph by principals. The findings presents the existence of various steering cultures among the principals, leading to the conclusion that a “metagovernor,” in this case the PTA, is central to achieving successful outcomes. The metagovernor designed the planning process and formulated a procurement document that satisfied the principals. In this process, the metagovernor negotiated separately with each principal, focusing on the particular characteristics of each principal.
Fragmentation, or the proliferation of independent jurisdictions, is a key feature of the political structure in many metropolitan areas in the United States. This article engages sorting theories to investigate racial segregation as one potential negative consequence of school district fragmentation in metropolitan areas. The main results suggest that fragmentation does increase multiracial segregation between districts. Using a decomposable segregation measure, the author also finds that fragmentation has a negative impact on segregation within districts and no significant effect on tract-level segregation. Additionally, the results suggest that the causes of segregation may differ for various race/ethnic groups. I argue here that segregation between political units may in fact be more appropriate than segregation between smaller units, such as census tracts, if one believes that the negative consequences of segregation stem from access to and social interactions within public institutions.