Metropolitan Resilience in a Time of Economic Turmoil

How Cities Collaborate While Competing in the New Economy

how cities collaborate while competing in the new Economy richard c. feiock florida state university Five years after the onset of the “Great Recession,” its aftereffects continued to limit the economic opportunities of cities. Yet the Great Recession also unleashed forces to reshape the way that metropolitan regions are governed. By accelerating both competition and collaboration, this restructuring creates the potential for metropolitan regions to be more resilient. Competition and collaboration are often assumed to reflect conflicting values . Thus, in conventional urban theories, these two offer alternative paths for organizing metropolitan areas: one based on competitive markets for public goods with tax and policy competition for residents and tax base; and the other based on collaboration through centralized planning and authority to integrate the metropolitan area as a system. I argue instead that competition and collaboration operate in complementary and reinforcing ways. Visionary local leaders are pursuing this stance by addressing local and regional issues in ways that take advantage of the innovative energy produced by aligning competitive and collaborative goals. The study of urban politics has been slow to catch up with this reality. Debates over the desirability of centralized versus decentralized systems have dominated discussions of the structure of government and public service provision in metropolitan areas for almost half a century.1 Following Tiebout, advocates of intergovernmental competition in the delivery of public goods treat decentralization and competition as synonymous. This treatment leads much of that work to be blind to mechanisms other than competition that can coordinate and integrate decisions among local governments in jurisdictionally fragmented areas.2 90 richard c. feiock Since about 1990 a new regionalist perspective has emerged that recognizes that collaborative regional governance solutions are possible in jurisdictionally fragmented settings. This work seeks to replace competition with collective governance mechanisms by creating associations, partnerships, districts, or regional councils through which the collective interests of a region can be pursued. This research has made important contributions, but scholarship in the new regionalism tradition suffers from three limitations that prevent it from advancing a more general explanation of urban governance that can inform both theory and practice. The limitations are an implicit or explicit assumption that collaborative mechanisms are substitutes for, rather than complements to intergovernmental competition; neglect of the transaction costs and collective action problems inherent in forming and maintaining the regional governance institutions they prescribe; and the scholarship’s disregard for bilateral mechanisms based on networks, contracting, and bargaining , which impose lower costs, have greater political feasibility, and in at least some instances provide a more effective solution to regional problems. This chapter address these issues by offering a framework based on institutional collective action theory that charts potentially promising paths for both the study and practice of local governance in U.S. metropolitan areas. After review of the public-goods market and new regionalism perspectives, I describe a recently developed taxonomy of collaborative regional governance mechanisms. I then link these instruments to contemporary urban problems to describe both the advantages and the limitations of self-organizing mechanisms. This approach is illustrated by examining how self-organizing network governance can mediate competition and collaboration for local economic development. Finally, I discuss the implications and limitations of multiplexity and self-organization for metropolitan theory and practice. InterloCal ComPetItIon, CollaboratIon, and eFFICIenCy Scholars of public administration and metropolitan political economy agree on the importance of regional governance for solving collective problems but disagree on the form that governance should take.3 Much of the debate on how best to organize local government hinges on the interpretation of key normative values and on how those normative values are measured in empirical analysis. In particular, the value of efficiency is a central theme, but because efficiency can be defined in different ways, each side has tended to talk past the other. how cities collaborate while competing 91 In policy discussions, two types of efficiency are recognized: technical (or productive) efficiency and allocative efficiency. Technical efficiency is the relationship between inputs and outputs. The higher the output of some productive process relative to the input, the more technically efficient that process is. Thus, at any given level of input, citizens are better off the more technically efficient the production. Allocative efficiency is a relationship between demand and supply. The closer the match between the type and level of service that citizens want and what they receive, the greater the allocative efficiency. Comparisons of consolidated versus...