Trust and Timing

Abstract

Keywords

collaboration local government trust relationships practice

Expert Panel Comments on the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock Article, “Bridging Academic and Practitioner Interests on Inter-local Collaboration: Seasoned Managers Share Their Experiences in Florida”

There are upward of 90,000 local governmental units in the United States. These frequently cash-strapped local governments offer similar amenities to comparable beneficiary groups often differentiated only by jurisdictional lines. Therefore, operational collaboration seems an obvious prospect in any efforts to reduce costs, tighten management, and improve quality in local government. For the same reasons, the topic of collaboration has become a hallmark of academic research in public administration. It is a recurrent theme in scholarly endeavors on local government and a touchstone of attempts to enhance efficacy at the local level through study and investigation.

Interlocal Collaboration and Academic Research

This issue of the State and Local Government Review’s (SLGR) Governance Matters (GM) section features an article by “pracademic” Robert E. Lee, a former city manager and currently assistant professor at Gulf Coast University and practitioner Sarah Hannah-Spurlock who is the assistant city manager of Key West, Florida. In addition, this issue features the extended views of three prominent and respected local managers drawn from protracted interviews with them. They were asked to comment on the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article and share their own thoughts and experience on the topics of local collaboration and the usefulness of academic research for practice.

The Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article focuses on the views of practicing city managers on interlocal collaboration (ILC) and how these views match up with the interests of academics on the topic. Beginning with five key areas supposed to influence ILC and favored for further research in the academic literature, Lee and Hannah-Spurlock ask practicing managers which ones best reflect their experience and interests and narrow these to three:

assessing how state and federal mandates shape local government collaboration,

determining informal and nonfinancial forms of interlocal government agreements, and

describing the outcomes of successful collaborative initiatives (this includes decision making on goals and evaluation processes for outcomes).

Asking what they call seasoned managers how the three topics match up with their experience of interlocal cooperation in practice, the authors found some things that were not apparent from the academic literature. First, most formal interlocal agreements (ILAs) they encountered centered on facility sharing whereas most informal ILC involved ad hoc equipment sharing or cooperative purchasing. Second, the seasoned managers did not think that federal mandates played much of a role in their decisions on ILC and they did not pay much attention to process in initiating it or to formal evaluation in assessing it. Both sorts of findings do not give much support to notions that academic interests on ILC are shared by or useful to seasoned, practicing managers.

Interviews with an Expert Panel

For some independent confirmation and extended thinking on these issues, a view of ILC from outside of Florida, and to deepen an understanding of the academic-practitioner match on the topic, SLGR GM asked three prominent and respected in-service managers to both read and comment on the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article as well as share their own thoughts and experience on the topics of local collaboration and the usefulness of academic research for practice. One respondent was from the Southeast, one from the Southwest, and the other from the West. They were sent a copy of the article and two general questions on it to help focus and make commensurable their thinking. The three panelists were

Jane Brautigam, City Manager, Boulder, Colorado;

Jim Keene, City Manager, Palo Alto, California; and

Tom Lundy, County Manager, Catawba County, North Carolina.

The GM editor, author of this piece, interviewed each participant at length. Interviews lasted from fifty-five minutes to one hour and twenty minutes. The interviews were recorded and transcribed and are the data source for the views expressed and the quotations highlighted in this article.

The three expert managers consulted about the article had a lot to say. They proffered their views on the article itself as well as the findings. Most of their commentary was in direct response to the main themes of the article and, in most cases, expanded on it. Nevertheless, they touched on some additional ideas and offered interesting examples of how local collaboration actually worked in their own jurisdictions.

Expert Panel’s Overall Assessment of the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock Article

Overall, the three commentators thought the article raised an important issue, had some interesting findings, and was a valuable read. They were in agreement about the importance of the topic of ILC and of the idiosyncratic nature of forming ILAs. Tom Lundy commented that ILC is a …

…critically important issue for local government and community success in the future. I think none of us have a monopoly on wisdom or experience or are experts in everything and offering up and accentuating the opportunities that are available when we collaborate is really good: good in terms of using our staff’s expertise, good in terms of better spending the public’s dollar with our limited resources. I don’t think the public is as focused in general on boundaries as we are in local government and so they don’t keep up as much with where the city and county boundaries lie, they are interested in services, what the seal on the vehicle or the patch says is not as important to people as getting really good service. Collaboration is a way to partner with others who may be stronger than you and then reciprocate, all for the benefit of the public. This was a reminder of the importance of partnership, we need to take the initiative and also remain open and receptive to things others bring us. We have 100 counties in North Carolina and counties were created at a certain size for the express reason that everybody needed to get to the county seat and back in a day’s time when they were traveling by horse and buggy. Why have 100 counties in North Carolina today? Is that the best model? Probably not, but it likely isn’t going to change.

Jim Keene thought the topic of ILC was key for local government. Therefore, the piece did a valuable service in looking at it. He did not see the focus on managers in Florida as an important limitation for its usefulness for others elsewhere.

I think that the piece is helpful particularly as it relates to the seasoned practitioners’ responses. It pretty accurately describes the current state of affairs. Even though it is focused on Florida managers it is not like I thought people from another culture were talking. It is transferrable to the state of affairs of pretty much everywhere. I am in that seasoned manager category and I generally would agree with those assessments.

Jane Brautigam had a different take on ILC. She saw it as important, but perhaps played up as important more often than being important. That is, she maintained that it is a response to problems that is favored politically, but not always the most efficient one practically given costs and benefits.

The politically correct answer is that it is quite important, but the practical answer is that nobody has time to do it because it takes extra effort to work with another community and understand your needs and their needs. You may have different cultures and there are lots of arrangements to be made that take effort and time. In the real world people do not have time to do it always. In my view, it is only when there is something crucial that people are willing to take the time and effort to make inter-local efforts happen. So, I think that sometimes elected officials might say, “Oh we can share facilities; we can share trash service.” It is relatively day-to-day minor stuff that each community delivers effectively on its own. So the increment of efficiency or effectiveness gained by jointly doing it is either negative or will take so much effort to do it that it is honestly not worth the brain damage. Joint efforts come into play on really big things like emergencies.

Reactions to the Article from Experience in Practice

Interestingly, Keene believed that any faults in the article were directly linked to practice. That is, the limits of response were the limits in the nature of practice for the scope of ILAs. Essentially, there is a fundamental mismatch between the way local governments are bounded, sized, and structured and the scope of systemic problems. He said…

…deficiency in the study is linked to the deficiency in our effective use of inter-local agreements and partnerships which is elementary [compared] to the system demands and system problems and the geographic boundaries and capacity differences that we have; between governance and problems. We’re not doing a whole heck of a lot in general. Part of the reason this topic is interesting is because we realize there are big challenges or big problems and that the governing or responding authority or capacity is not scaled adequately to match with the scale of the problems or issues. That is the problem. So, it is accurate, but it describes a somewhat dismal state of affairs if you take a long view of some of the problems that we have in our society.

Keene also pointed out that he was not convinced that eliminating contracting from the piece gave the full picture. He believed that the situation was subtler in practice.

We have an inter-local agreement that probably fits [what the authors] excluded a little bit: just sort of business arrangements or just contracting something out. I think it is a little more nuanced than that. We run the Regional Water Quality control plant for five or six different jurisdictions. So we basically run the sewage treatment plant for Silicon Valley. We do it quite effectively. I don’t think it is just a contracting out operation. Very often in these collaborative arrangements the easiest implementation approach is to accept that one jurisdiction will be the lead and just run stuff. It is more collaboration than it could appear by just taking money.

There were some critical reactions to the article. These centered on two main points. First, that more detail on some issues might have been helpful. Second, some panelists expressed disagreement about the fit between the article’s findings and their own experience in practice. Jane Brautigam may have summed it up when she offered an observation on both points.

I was a little confused about formal agreements working best for facilities that deliver services and not the services themselves—I did not understand the difference. It would have been helpful to unpack that distinction. There were two different ways that I could read it: one is, suppose I have a recreation center and I enter into an agreement with my next-door neighbor city to use it half the time and we each use it half the time but we don’t provide joint services; or a second is, suppose you share a library, and the patrons from both communities get to go to the library but only one city takes on the burden of staffing and providing the day to day services and the other city pays money. My experience is that formal ILAs are the second.

Tom Lundy supported Jane Brautigam’s view. He also thought that his experience in formal ILAs included both facility and service sharing, but rested more in the latter. In fact, he offered additional examples of how that worked.

That has not been our experience—sharing facilities rather than joint services. We do share some physical facilities, for example, we operate a joint jail with a neighboring county, but we have more along the lines of joint services. For example, [the county has] three school systems and we are responsible for providing the facilities. So years ago we funded a construction manager for the three systems: somebody who would work with plans and designs, make sure we are getting the most bang for our buck, and then actually be on-site supervising the construction to make sure the plans were followed, change orders made sense, and so on.

Also, Lundy asked for more detail for factors mentioned in Tables 2 and 3. Specifically, he indicated that the most important thing for him, human interaction, was mentioned in Table 2, but not well developed in the article.

The decision-making factors on Table 2 are important, but human factors are the most important in my experience. It is going to be an easier negotiation and to give up control or invest my resources with someone else to manage if I have had a good experience, if I have good working relationship, have that trust. You can have opportunities, you can have people propose ideas to you, but if you don’t have that sound working relationship, don’t have that trust, it becomes harder, not impossible, but it becomes harder.

In addition, he opined that the focus on staff in Table 3 might be overblown when compared to his experience. One thing that was left out is the role of managers themselves in framing an accord for ILAs. Often, he noted, managers can see the panorama that leads to agreement and then subject matter experts can implement the details.

Managers have to set the tone; set expectations. A lot of times managers see a much bigger picture. I remember contracting for capacity in a new sewer plant and we got stuck on how much the technical staff in the other jurisdiction wanted to charge; our staff didn’t want to pay that, so we got stuck on a number. I finally just said, “What if we leave it the way it is and we agree that they will fund a water line sometime in the future?” The most important thing is that we were able to side step an issue that would have destroyed the agreement. Because technical staff is so good and so precise, sometimes the managers can see the bigger picture or give to get something for later or to facilitate another agreement. Sometimes reaching agreement is as important as reaching total equity.

Views on Formal Evaluation of ILAs

An important finding in the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article is that the respondents did not formally evaluate ILAs after they were in place. The three expert managers interviewed were asked for their opinions about this point. Like Jane Brautigm, all three allowed that it was true in their jurisdictions too.

That is an excellent point. Well and formally evaluated ILAs? We don’t evaluate them at all. We just say, “They are good, hurray, we are doing them, look at us.” A lot of times we don’t do it because we say, “Okay, finally got that done” and we move on. People don’t take the time: the crush of the moment takes you in a new direction. We are trying to embark on a dashboard effort that will give us data to better evaluate all of our programs.

Jim Keene offered that evaluation is not formalized or done very well within single organizations. So, it is not surprising, if it is not done when different organizations or jurisdictions work together. Moreover, when dealing with ILAs, there is more to consider than just the impact, especially among long-standing regional governance arrangements.

Evaluation is even harder with multi-jurisdictional agreements because there is less control. The agreements do not even have strong governance rules, let alone formal evaluations. They don’t answer questions like, “How and why do we maintain this, at what point do we review or sunset, how do we kill this off when it is not working?” You are not just missing measures of how it is doing but the ability to sunset is not considered. A clear sense of mission, time frame, and whether to continue or not are as important as formal evaluation. We have created so many regional governing bodies in the Bay Area that we now have the challenge of reintegrating them in a meaningful way to make broad system choices.

Tom Lundy agreed that formal evaluation was unlikely for ILAs. Nonetheless, he thought that informal evaluation might fulfill that need. This is especially true when ILAs are operational or deadlines are up.

I would agree that we don’t tend to have a lot of formal processes embedded in agreements. They certainly ought to be in. My guess is that most jurisdictions are doing informal reviews all the time—if we are sharing an EMS unit are we getting appropriate response times, are we paying more than we should be paying? A lot of agreements will have an automatic renewal and renewals are an opportunity for parties to sit back down and see if something needs to be changed.

Views on State and Federal Mandates and ILAs

Another key finding in the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article was that respondents did not find state and federal mandates to be important for ILAs. This was contrary to its importance as a factor in the academic literature. Jim Keene stressed the local nature of action and how it was geographic rather than regulatory factors were more important when deciding to collaborate.

From the local point of view, geography trumps federalism. We are dealing with place-based issues or problems so economies of scale link to geography more often than the governance or funding structure of our society. When I was in graduate school the saying was, “The local governments have the problems, the states have the power, and the federal government has the money.” Today, the federal government doesn’t really have the money except in a few areas; the states might have the power but they are going off in a lot of different directions and they are not effectively focused on local government except to push mandates down; and local governments still have the problems. We are not getting much from those other levels and it is easy to question if we need to respond. Yes we can be forced to in a regulatory or legal environment, when it comes to solving really intractable problems we feel like we are on our own more and more. All of the real action on sustainability for example is happening at the level of cities in this country not at the level of states or of the federal government regardless of regulations or policy. All the innovation is taking place at the local level.

Likewise, Jane Brautigam did not see mandates as important, but for related, yet somewhat different reasons. She sees complaining about mandates as largely symbolic and habitual. In fact, it plays little role in establishing what is important or making decisions.

In the article people were sort of interested in state and federal mandates and yet when the time came to say whether they influenced collaboration, they said, “No it doesn’t.” I would not have been interested in state and local mandates because I don’t think they shape collaboration, as the article indicated. For so many years, decades, in local government when people get together they said, “Oh I hate those state and federal mandates. We don’t have the money.” It has almost become trite, but everybody still says, “Stop telling us to do stuff and not give us any money!” I don’t find that to be important. When something is important, we find ways to make it happen because for some reason it is important and should be important to us as well.

Thoughts on the Nature of ILCs in Practice

As well as their views on the most significant findings in the article, each expert respondent was asked for their particular views about ILCs and ILAs themselves. Also, they were asked for examples of successes in their own experience. Their views on interlocal collaboration raised important points about its nature at the local level.

Relationship Based

Each of the experts felt that interlocal collaboration only worked when there were preexisting relationships or what might be called personal investment in social capital projects. It was best when the relationship was good, but even when not the key ingredient was confidence in rather than liking for the other party. As Tom Lundy put it,

To me collaboration is effective if you’ve got strong working relationships. You have to have a culture where you have relationships with your counterparts and hopefully you’ve build these relationships before you have an issue that you have to deal with. I have worked with managers where it was really difficult because it just did not work, I had a relationship with someone, it was like oil and water, but after a while it got to the point where we could sit down with our staffs and in an hour or two work out a complex arrangement. We would talk about it and say, we are finished just reduce it writing. It all goes back to relationships and trust.

Also, all of those interviewed felt that in their experience preexisting relationships were what allowed opportunities to be converted into collaboration. Jim Keene may have made the point when he said,

There are relationships that exist just because they have to and then you have ones that have a personal component as well as professional, a value system that is shared and the ability of people in those positions to broker agreements. It is absolutely a fact that I could be in a situation where the commonality of interest is there, the opportunity for a meaningful agreement is there, but the personality on the other side is not, and the odds of that agreement being effectuated are dismal versus the odds with a willing partner in a relationship. That is more the driving factor. There are not practice approaches or methodologies to doing this stuff, they are more opportunistic and relationship based.

These relationships likely were nurtured over time as familiarity bred cooperation and cooperation led to success. The willingness to work together is undergirded by prior success. Tom Lundy indicated that it is important to establish these relationships without an end in mind.

I think about making sure that there are times to be together when you are not negotiating. Let’s just sit down with a cup of coffee even if we don’t have issues to discuss. You need non-agenda meetings: just be around the same table; get the group together. We started that maybe 20 years ago. We rotate jurisdictions. Sometimes there are no issues. That has been very helpful. When you do have work groups, share as much information as you have. You can make people more knowledgeable by making them part of the process.

One reason relationships are so important to having interlocal collaboration at all is that working together is very difficult. There are more potential pitfalls and costs than there are clear paths and benefits in many instances. So, the effort involved in persuasion and convincement are difficult to muster. As Jane Brautigam opined,

Any time you are doing something with someone else it is really hard to understand what their issues are and have them understand your issues. Their processes are different—it is REALLY HARD to work together toward a common goal. So, if you have a built in relationship you already know a little bit about them and you have already gotten past the difficult beginnings of a relationship—trust has been built up. There is confidence that they will follow through and you will too.

Ad Hoc and Opportunistic

In agreement with the article, the three expert managers did see ILCs as largely unplanned and responding to opportunities. They do not come into being out of rational analysis of problems, but recognized need. They are supported by key factors like leadership and the facts of preexisting relationships and trust as mentioned earlier. As put by Jim Keene,

They are mostly driven by the degree of the problem, the leadership that is in place and an acknowledgement of the shared problem and willingness and ability to drive toward a solution. It is the leadership more than anything else that is a factor that determines what happens. It is alignment among like-minded people who are willing to try and work together more than the problem or issue. It is the ability to grab hold of a problem and work together with like-minded folks.

Jane Brautigam’s view of the difficulty of ILC led her to support this view. She focused on how and when problems are mutually recognized and the transaction cost of persuasion is avoided. As she puts it, the obvious nature of a problem leads to the opportunity to work together.

I do think [collaboration] is ad hoc and opportunistic. The planning is so hard and takes so much effort, but when something pops up and parties see it as an opportunity for themselves there is an instant meeting of the minds and you are past having to talk the other person into it. It becomes obvious and it happens a lot more easily. Emergency providers are wired to work together because no one can handle all that on their own. The other easy example is purchasing services from one another.

Relevance of Academic Research for Practice

Because the Lee and Hannah-Spurlock article looked at the relevance of academic research for practitioners based on their point of view, the three expert respondents were asked for their views on this topic. In addition, they were requested to comment on how to make such research more relevant to them. All of them agreed that it had some usefulness, but that it could be improved in various ways. One thing that they all shared was the search for detailed solutions, models, and examples for particular problems that could inform their practice rather than testing of theory or generalized answers to research questions. In sum, they wanted utilizable knowledge—it did not matter if it was quantitative or qualitative, but rather that they could employ it immediately or be inspired by it in their search for solutions. For example, Jane Brautigam indicated that while cases were important for her, opinion research was not at all.

We are all trying to become far more data-driven than in the past but research that involves the opinions of others is okay but it just does not solve a problem. The kind of things that appeal to me are case studies or pilot projects that others have done that you cannot really replicate in your own community but that spark an idea about something that you can do that will make things a little bit better. Academic research seems a little inscrutable and I am not always sure what problem is being solved. In a case study it is very clear what they wanted to get done, what they did, and what was their success. To be more helpful, academic research needs to define a really clear problem that lots of people face and then find the data that point to the solutions that are the best ones.

The challenge for academic research for Jim Keene consisted mostly in its theoretical rather than speculative nature. This means that it points toward the past and not the future. It is not focused on solving real problems and assessing the risks and outcomes. Moreover, this is especially pointed in looking at collaboration needs.

Academic papers reference prior research so there is a tendency to be focused on history or a description of the current state and not as much focused on being able to project forward, forecast, or present alternative scenarios of a likely assessment of risk and success. That is what practitioners are looking for, particularly when we are talking about something that is outside of our immediate control: inter-local agreements are exactly that. The forecast of when and how best to do something is critical in any of these papers. What I am interested in are innovations now or what do we need to do in the future to get us there. Our Regional Water Quality control plant sits within the mapped area of definite sea-level rise in the Bay Area in the next 35 to 50 years. We are faced with a real inter-local challenge: how are we going to treat our sewage with a plant that needs to be replaced or mitigated because it is going to be under water? When I talk to my folks and say, “What is our strategy for sea-level rise?” They say, “Our assumption is that there will be a regional solution.” That is not a very comforting thought. This is what managers are dealing with. We have these real problems and we know that we need to cooperate better or scale up. We are most interested in some examples that have worked.

In the same way, Tom Lundy would like to see more future-oriented research, but perhaps even more speculative on occasion, especially when projecting out. In addition, he raises the issue of how useful academic research can be when it generalizes across many jurisdictions with particular circumstances. One way to improve this, he says, is to talk more to practitioners about the validity of findings for their jurisdictions.

The relevance of academic research depends on its parameters, timeliness, and locale. When the Alliance for Innovation sponsored research to look at grievances (how to avoid them, how to have a happier more productive workforce) by surveying jurisdictions in North Carolina, a concern early on was that rules might be different in say, Arkansas or Virginia. Community dynamics are different, state laws are different, the level of experience of managers is different, relationships among governing bodies are different—there is a lot that is different. What helps to make it more relevant is talking to practitioners. Let’s test what the research says against the practitioners’ views. Research can say to us, here is what has worked, here is why it has worked, and these are the component pieces that need to be thought about going into it. Also, although it is wonderful to have research about how to do better what we are doing now, there is value in thinking about the future. A lot has been written descriptively about baby boomers, millennials, etc. but we have tried to focus on what we could postulate about the work force 15 to 20 years in the future and what that means for the workplace and work: what our offices ought to look like, how much gets done physically, what kind of skill sets—both hard and soft—to look for in employees for the future. The struggle has been that a lot of the academic research says what is instead of what might be.

Examples of Successful ILC and ILAs

The three responding managers were asked to provide some specific examples of successful efforts in ILC. Their comments were filled with illustrations from their own experience and their choices of success and rationales were illustrative, interesting, and informative. Most reflected the themes they mentioned earlier about the nature of ILC.

Jim Keene presented an example that features, among other things, the establishment of relationships. It illustrates both the development of trust by working together and the piloting of operations. In addition, it is in the field of emergency response, which, as Jane Brautgam points out, is a fruitful field for ILAs.

We have done a virtual emergency dispatch with Los Altos and Mountainview which is a prelude to doing an actual bricks and mortar regional center. It is a virtual dispatch that puts us all on the same technology and same frequency. It has allowed us to have services provided between different jurisdictions. This is different from mutual aid—for example, on the border between Palo Alto and Mountainview we will have as many Mountainview trucks responding to an event in Palo Alto as Mountainview and vice versa. This is not just mutual aid—the response unit that is closer will handle it as if it were in their own city.

Jane Brautigam offered another example that highlighted not only the importance of establishing relationships but also the importance of helping others to mutually identify problems using these relationships. As an example of how this might work in practice, she recalled how in her jurisdiction was able to help surrounding cities see a shared problem. Nevertheless, the solution may not be clear, a shared one, or the resources available to undertake one.

We would like to enlist the aid of the surrounding suburban cities that think they don’t have a problem with the homeless, but in effect wind up sending their homeless to us because we have the services. It is a real battle to convince them that they have a problem. To solve this, you both have to realize that you have a problem—not just that you do and want the other jurisdiction to help you with it. Our county government has created the consortium of cities with one elected official representative from each city and we meet once a month to talk about countywide issues. So, one of our council representatives put the homeless problem on the agenda and our staff attended and made a presentation that showed the smaller communities had a problem by using a homeless survey in Boulder that indicated last place of residence. It woke up the other cities and they had their eyes opened to the fact that it might be worth a countywide solution. But we have the services and still do not know what they and we want: money, affordable housing, have them go away? The small communities can only bring money and that seems insufficient.

As the manager of a larger county jurisdiction, Tom Lundy presented an example with multiple ingredients. It has elements of both an ILA and contracting out. In this example, government only pays but does not operate. It is also a case in which the construction manager that he mentioned earlier played a role in design and construction.

We built a $4 million animal shelter and opened it last year. It is divided into two discrete areas. If you want to abandon an animal or you want to adopt you come in and it is very different design, there are rooms for children or adults to play with the animals and make sure they want to adopt. The other side is the control part—we are out picking up dangerous animals. We contracted with the humane society to actually run the shelter part. So in this collaboration [the county] built the facility, the cities all contribute some of the operating costs because they house their animals there, but we have contracted out all of the adoption and abandonment, spaying and neutering to the Humane Society.

Conclusion

Three things stand out in the comments of our panel that shed light on both ILC and ILAs and on the relevance of academic research itself on these topics for practicing managers. First, that successful ILC and ILAs are made possible by previous relationships and trust garnered through them. Second, that although others may be educated about context, successful collaboration is recognized as an opportunity by all; otherwise, it may not be worth the cost of convincement. Third, the action on this topic goes on at the local level, whether one is focused on the practice of governance or the conduct of research.

Respondents spoke clearly in their consideration of the human factors in successful ILC or what is called here a relationship. Short of exigent emergencies, there is no opportunity that is likely to result in ILC without the prior acquaintance, confidence, and trust among the parties. Moreover, while this relationship could occur accidentally, it is usually the product of sustained nurturing and development. In short, successful ILCs, and the ILAs that encapsulate them, are the product of leadership at the local level that begins long before an opportunity to work together is identified. This is leadership in the investment of social capital in an infrastructure of mutual expectation that can bear the weight of numerous collaborations. It is interesting to speculate that this may be one reason why, according to our authors and our respondents, ILAs do not contain much in the way of specified formal evaluation: trust among the parties obviates the need for precise measurement of output-side contributions.

Also, it is clear from both authors and respondents that most collaboration takes advantage of a relationship through mutual recognition of the obvious by the participants. Aside from the incontrovertible evidence of urgency that demands the attention of all, such as a wildfire or other natural occurrence, the ground condition for successful ILC is the recognition of mutual problems. Moreover, all parties recognize these problems because they share more than a legal or regulatory framework. They share geography and demography and thus cannot escape a shared natural or economic environment. National problems may drive local governments to undertake solutions when other distant jurisdictions do, but it is the peculiarity of local circumstances that leads to relationship-enabled cooperation with neighbors who share their particular problems, not imposed mandates, regulations, or edicts. The costs of attending to national demands or rational analysis and persuasion may far outweigh the benefits.

Just as local problems are particular, so are local solutions. This is seen clearly in the demand for research that is both applied and forward looking among our respondents. To address local problems appropriately takes knowledge that is pragmatic and solves a current, specific, localized problem, whether or not that knowledge can be used or is true in another place or circumstance. What those in practice desire according to our experts is part inspiration and part perspiration to trade on the old saw about invention: they want cases, reports, analysis that helps their thinking about the problems they face, and, when possible, something that they can try in their own circumstances with appropriate modification. This does not mean that traditional academic research is not useful to them; rather, it means that academic research that is more mindful of strategic and environmental contingencies, which can isolate elements and outcomes that can be tried out or piloted, and which are projective and have advice for the long term may be more readily useful to local government managers. They are interested in things that work or can be adapted to work.

Clearly, there is room for more research on this topic. One thing that has gone untouched in this discussion is the role of the state in incenting impeding ILC. Another is the way states approach ILC in their economic, legal, and regulatory frameworks; still another is the variety and variability of formal ILAs. With local government in the United States playing such a large and, in many cases, leading role, the topic of local cooperation and interlocal agreement will continue to provoke managers and academics alike to both think and to innovate.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.