Metropolitan Governance in the Federalist Americas ed. by Peter K. Spink, Peter M. Ward, Robert Wilson (review)

The Iberian imprint on governance since the colonial period straight-jacketed Portuguese and Spanish colonies. Strong central governments gave Lisbon and Madrid effective templates for extracting wealth, acquiring land, slavery, and proselytization, among other advantages. Yet in the nearly 200 years since independence, many countries in the Americas –and this volume adds to the mix the Anglo-Saxon and French colonies of the United States and Canada, respectively—have struggled with good governance in highly complex aggregates of townships, counties, states, and metropolitan areas. This interdisciplinary editorship, consisting of planners, geographers, public administrators, and political scientists, asks whether “current and emerging initiatives and structures of governance [are] capable of meeting the challenges of collective life in these large and complex metropolitan areas?” (p. 3). Their three-pronged approach relies on 1) describing the key characteristics and organizational forms of these governments and the kinds of policy issues they address; 2) identifying the factors that shape those systems, and 3) pondering whether these initiatives for democratic governance allow citizens a chance to participate and thus acquire political legitimacy.

Introductory and concluding chapters examine six federalist countries of the Americas: Canada, the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela (under the Chávez government). Metropolitan is used to mean “large, contiguous, built-up areas, involving one or usually more local governmental jurisdictions” and governance “describes the process that defines the expectations of participation by different sectors of civil and political society in the decision-making process” (p. 2). While the normative definitions are useful, one quickly learns that the term ‘metropolitan’ varies considerably. In Brazil, it covers territorial regions in constitutional terms. Writers as divergent as the Inter-American Development Bank, Lefevre, and others claim that the top-down approach to governance is being replaced by a bottom-up way. To be sure, conceptual and comparative terms are not trouble-free and the authors make that plain in the introductory chapter. These are important questions given that Latin America is now in its ‘third-wave’ of democracy, and the degrees of coordination are schematically laid out in the first Figure. There are at least a half-dozen research questions for graduate students and scholars in many disciplines who wish to address the spatial and policy implications of the coordination efforts underway in the Americas.

Andrew Sancton tackles these issues in the Canadian case in Chapter 2 by examining census metropolitan areas (CMAs) with more than a half-million residents. We learn that metropolitan governance “now has virtually no political salience in Canada” (p. 61), mostly because the central city carries enough political and economic clout to shape policy for the cities and their hinterlands. Vancouver exerts influence to encourage cooperation, Montreal remains weak, while Toronto’s influence is so strong that the provincial government of Ontario is increasingly taking control of policy and governance matters.

Robert Wilson then assesses the case of the USA and asks whether fragmentation is an effective strategy’. Not surprisingly, we learn it is not, but lots of factors account for that: political parties do not organize at the metropolitan level, local communities tend to detach their problems from the large counties that encase them, and –besides—“fragmentation and proliferation of limited-purpose structures” actually work reasonably well. Wilson draws heavily on the ad hoc metropolitanism of St. Louis in fleshing out these conclusions.

Brazilian scholars Teixeira and Clemente join editor Spink in drawing out lessons learned from inter-municipal consortia in Brazil. Unfortunately, few state governors, federal agencies, or big-city mayors give much attention to metropolitan issues. While the conversion of Rio de Janeiro (city) into a state in 1975 was one method of enhancing metropolitan governance, it is not a panacea. Instead, the authors propose a half-dozen strategies to enhance intra- and inter-metropolitan governance.

Peter Ward...