Thomas Skuzinski uses a study of local government land use planning in Michigan, specifically the metropolitan areas of Grand Rapids and Detroit, to make a compelling argument for a new approach to understanding regional governance. He applies his sociocultural collective action framework to analyze social and cultural factors to understand why political and civic leaders engage in, or avoid engagement in, local cooperative and collaborative governance processes. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on regional governance.
David K. Hamilton, Director of the Center for Public Service, Texas Tech University, USA
Skuzinskis work opens a promising avenue to explore the challenges and opportunities for interlocal collaboration and more effective regional governance. Beyond more evidence that agreements and consolidations are not all about the costs, his sociocultural collective action model advocates a theoretical turn that may nurture more politically viable structural reforms for a variety of public services.
Kurt Thurmaier, Presidential Engagement Professor and Chair, Northern Illinois University, USA
The Risk of Regional Governance
Creating metropolitan regions that are more efficient, equitable, and sustainable depends on the willingness of local officials to work together across municipal boundaries to solve large-scale problems. How do these local officials think? Why do they only sometimes cooperate? What kind of governance do they choose in the face of persistent problems?
The Risk of Regional Governance offers a new perspective on these questions. Drawing on theory from sociology and anthropology, it argues that many of the most important cooperative decisions local officials makethose about land use planning and regulationare driven by heuristic, biased reasoning driven by cultural values. The Risk of Regional Governance builds a sociocultural collective action framework, and supports it with rich survey and interview data from hundreds of local elected officials serving in the suburbs of Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a story of the Rust Belt, of how local officials think about their community and the region, andmost importantlyof how we might craft policies that can overcome biases against regional governance.
Thomas Skuzinski is Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech University. He holds doctoral and master degrees from the University of Michigan, and a law degree from Michigan State University. His work uses a sociological institutionalist lens to examine how the rules, norms, and cultures in which local government actors are embedded shape metropolitan governance.
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The Risk of Regional Governance
Cultural Theory and Interlocal Cooperation
Thomas Skuzinski
The Risk of Regional Governance
Cultural Theory and Interlocal Cooperation
Thomas Skuzinski
First published 2018
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ISBN: 978-1-138-23575-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-30403-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
To Michael and Elvira, and to my parents, for making this possible
Contents
Around the time I was nearing the completion of the manuscript for this book, a student commented to me that there was no point anymore in learning about what local governments can and cannot do. Its not like they can really make a difference now, she said resignedly. The conversation was in the middle of November 2016, shortly after a presidential election that had stunned even the most sage observers. I knew the student through a class I teach on land use law, and in it the dominant theme is the constraints faced by general purpose local governmentsthe tens of thousands of cities, towns, counties, villages, townships, and other units that comprise the crazy-quilt of sub-state government in the U.S. In one sense, then, the comment was not surprising because of the highly structuralist perspective from which I had presented the material. Local government actors had to navigate a space of legal limitation filled with constitutional provisions, statutes, regulations, and common law. They could only behave in the ways states dictated. I frequently emphasized to my students that local governments were, in the final analysis, creatures of the state. And their decisions were further circumscribed by resource scarcity. I had encountered many theorists in political science, public administration, and the law who imagined the local actor as existing in an institutional space of very limited discretion. My own experience growing up in Michigan and seeing first-hand the decline of the Rust Belt made this conceptualization quite easy to accept. It seemed that my student had picked up on my native impulses, and I suppose I should have been pleased.
But I had also taught about theories of statelocal fiscal federalism. I had lectured about the ways in which a quite expansive autonomy had been granted to many local governments through home rule constitutional and statutory provisions, and how land use planning and regulation werealong with public educationthe functions that were most strongly localized in the United States. My students and I had started to unpack, too, some of the clever ways local governments had attempted to deal with problems that the state and federal governments could not or would not effectively address. Americas cities and towns were, indeed, places of constraint, but they were also places of innovation and opportunitya notion of freedom that also had its scholarly adherents. In the wake of a federal election that was poised to fundamentally change the administration of national environmental and social policies, I found myselfmuch to my own surprisetouting the virtues of the empowered local government in the face of my students frustration and despondency. Local government officials, I insisted,
