Abstract
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded regional planning grants to seventy-four regions, raising the question of whether these regions were able to form lasting cross-sectoral knowledge communities (“epistemic communities”). We conduct in-depth case studies examining the politics and mechanics of how epistemic communities formed and have continued in regions where it might be challenging to do so (in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia), finding that the planning process promoted the growth of regional networks and incipient governance. We trace the new collaboration to the federal program, suggesting a role for higher levels of government in fostering regionalism.
Introduction
From economic resilience to social equity and environmental sustainability, many societal goods call for planning at the regional scale. For example, coordinated metropolitan planning for affordable, accessible transportation and housing near good jobs has implications for greenhouse gas reduction (Wheeler 2013). Yet scholars have done more to document the benefits of these approaches—expanding transit systems and designing communities with access to bike trails and fresh food—than they have to decode the politics of how to effectively plan for and govern regions. Indeed, in many regions, racial divides continue to differentiate city and outer-ring suburbs (Orfield 2011; Rothstein 2015; Self 2003); localist forces push back against unified visions for regions (Chapple 2015; Trapenberg Frick 2013); and fragmentation creates inefficiencies and inequities alike (Dreier, Swanstrom, and Mollenkopf 2000; Schafran 2018).
A growing literature shows how collaboration can foster dialogue among diverse stakeholders, improving regional governance and sustainability (Forester 1999; Innes and Booher 2010; Innes and Rongerude 2013). Repeated interaction around a specific task, such as developing a plan, can lead to common understandings of shared regional problems (Benner and Pastor 2015). Collaborative exercises in data collection can give regional actors an opportunity to develop a common vocabulary, agree on a geographic scale for discussing “regional” problems, and build trust in the institutions that typically act as repositories for that data by “reality checking” it against their own local knowledge (Benner and Pastor 2015; Innes and Booher 2010). Yet getting these players to the table and developing lasting partnerships is far from easy. We extend the literature on regional collaboration and governance by examining the role of a top-down incentive in fostering “epistemic communities” in fragmented regions. Benner and Pastor (2015) define epistemic communities as inclusive, cross-sector networks with shared understandings of regional problems.
Recently, a federal grant helped set the table for actors from different sectors to define and develop solutions to regional problems. The Sustainable Communities Initiative Regional Planning Grant (SCI-RPG) was a unique experiment in several ways. First, it funded regional planning across multiple agencies in regions, which is not typical for federal grants (Chapple 2015). Second, it required representation from across jurisdictional boundaries, whereas federal grants typically go to one city or regional entity. Third, it provided a comparatively flexible definition of sustainability, with an expectation of bottom-up priority setting. The grant provided a concrete task of developing, and in some cases implementing, a regional plan over a defined time period with enough resources to entice actors to the table.
Often the literatures on regional planning and collaboration examine initiatives that focus on a particular policy topic, such as transportation, or they focus on areas with a history of regionalism, such as large coastal metros. In this article, we examine three fragmented regions that have little previous experience with regional planning, a weak regional identity, and little support from state government for regionalism, yet were able to develop and begin to implement a regional plan. How and why did actors in these regions develop shared understandings of a set of regional problems? What decisions did local actors make that allowed them to continue their collaboration beyond the grant period and implement their plan? First, we hypothesize that the federal grant provided an incentive and a setting for these actors to develop epistemic communities. Second, we explore the counterhypothesis that these regions might have developed epistemic communities without the grant. We use case study methods to evaluate these questions and weigh each hypothesis (Yin 2017). Finally, not all seventy-four grantee regions formed an epistemic community or implemented their plan. We briefly examine a grantee region that did not form an epistemic community—and its similarities and differences with our case regions—before making conclusions about our three case regions.
We begin with a discussion of previous research on cross-sector collaboration, epistemic community formation, and multi-level governance. We then describe the SCI-RPG and previous survey-based research on its impacts on collaboration. After a brief description of our case study methods and what makes these regions “unlikely” candidates for forming new epistemic communities, we tell the story of each region’s experience with developing a knowledge community with a shared sense of regional problems through the Sustainable Communities grant process. Following this, we discuss ongoing implementation efforts and what motivates them in each region. We then draw comparisons between our cases and a region that did not continue their regional collaboration beyond the grant period. We conclude with a discussion of implications for understandings of epistemic communities, regional identity formation, and regional planning.
Networks for Regional Collaboration and Governance
Societal problems from housing inequality to traffic congestion and climate change impacts arise at a regional scale, with few solutions possible at the level of the individual jurisdiction. There are many potentially intersecting definitions of a region, for example, based on geography and natural resources, such as watersheds, or economic activity, including “commute sheds” and production clusters (Giuliano 1991; McHarg 1969; Storper 1997; Wescoat 2000). Regions are also defined by the often-overlapping boundaries of multi-purpose government bodies and single-purpose public agencies (Burns 1994; Savitch and Vogel 1996). Given the limited powers of most regional governments in the United States, many look to innovative governance, using “bottom-up” collaboration across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors (Seltzer and Carbonell 2011; Stone 1989).
Regional governance occurs in a variety of arenas which may or may not have the same territorial boundaries. Public sector involvement in regional governance typically occurs through either councils of governments (COGs), which are voluntary organizations of local governments, or metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which were created primarily to plan and coordinate regional transportation systems (Dreier, Swanstrom, and Mollenkopf 2000). In economically distressed regions, 1 economic development districts (EDDs) prepare Comprehensive Economic Development Strategies (CEDS) to be eligible for certain federal funds. 2 Whatever the form of regional governance, it tends to rely heavily on collaboration through networks, and may also be shaped by relationships with higher levels of government (Weir, Rongerude, and Ansell 2009). The following provides an overview of scholarship on how collaboration, epistemic communities, and multi-level governance work to further regional planning approaches.
Collaboration in Planning
Regional planning often involves efforts to promote collaboration across different sectors that have different interests and levels of power over different resources (McKinney and Johnson 2009). In this context, dialogue among stakeholders can build a common understanding that then motivates collaboration (Innes and Booher 1999). This ideal of an inclusive, equitable regional planning “table” envisions a diverse group of stakeholders aligning their goals and definitions to help address complex social ills (Kania and Kramer 2011).
Voluntary collaborative networks in regions help produce regional governance in the absence of regional government by facilitating dialogue between a diverse mix of community members, key stakeholders, and planners (Healey 1997; Innes and Rongerude 2013). This dialogue yields both tangible and intangible results. Tangible products may include adopted policies and plans, legislation, innovative strategies, and follow-up efforts aimed at implementation. Examples of intangible results, referred to collectively as “collaborative rationality,” include a shared set of heuristics and trust between expert and nonexpert participants in the network (Innes and Booher 2010). Key elements for successful processes include leadership and sponsors to initiate efforts; resources to provide staff support and assist participants with attending meetings, particularly representatives from disadvantaged communities and the non-profit sector; incentives to encourage people to “stay at the table and work toward agreement”; a “negotiating document” around which to come to agreement; and “a self-organizing adapting process that evolve[s] with new information” (Innes and Booher 2010, 89–116). Successful processes may occur despite power dynamics, history, ideology, and other factors also being present at the “table” (Purcell 2003); for example, business groups and foundations have traditionally dominated voluntary regional initiatives, setting the agenda (Innes and Gruber 2005).
Scholars use the terms “boundary experience” and “boundary object” when describing the collaborative production of knowledge at the interface of fields or actors with different epistemological backgrounds (Star and Griesemer 1989, Fujimura 1992). Feldman et al. (2006) define “boundary experiences” as opportunities for repeated interaction among members of a network, or the “shared or joint activities that create a sense of community and an ability to transcend boundaries among participants” (pp. 93–4). These experiences provide time and context for developing a shared knowledge base or understanding of a problem. The outcome of this interaction, such as a report or plan, can provide a “boundary object,” or a touchpoint for communication across fields or ways of knowing, without necessarily representing consensus (Harvey and Chrisman 1998, pp. 1687). However, shared understandings of regional planning problems generated through common experiences may fail to adequately reflect issues that affect marginalized groups without an inclusive network and process of knowledge generation.
Beyond the idea of a boundary object or experience to bring actors together, this literature says little about the role of incentives, or about the role of vertical or multi-level networks in addition to horizontal. Instead, the focus is on what happens once actors in a horizontal network are at the table. We turn next to the literature on epistemic communities to examine its evolution and approach to incentives.
Epistemic Communities
The term “episteme” refers to a set of basic ideas or assumptions that a group of people share, sometimes underlying an entire society or time period (Foucault 1970). The term “epistemic communities” came about in the 1960s as a descriptive way of referring to scientists working together voluntarily to define the core problems of their field, later generalized in sociological studies to any networks of professionals generating knowledge within a field (Holzner 1968; Meyer and Molyneux-Hodgson 2010). In the 1990s, political scientists seeking to understand international cooperation applied the term to voluntary cross-border governance on environmental and other issues, but with an important shift toward the collective power and influence of networks of professionals on specific policy issues (Cross 2013; Haas 1992). Whether an epistemic community is effective at influencing decision-making and policy depends in part on its internal cohesiveness (Cross 2013). Particularly when actors are coming from different sectors, the “competing institutional logics” of their respective fields may “significantly influence the extent to which collaboration leaders can agree on essential elements of process and structure as well as outcomes” (Crosby and Bryson 2010, 226).
Adding a focus on responsiveness to community voices and equitable outcomes, Benner and Pastor (2012) adapt the idea of epistemic communities to cross-sector regional governance networks. They narrow the term to a specific geography, but broaden its application to different policy areas and participation. In their conceptualization, which has roots in collaborative rationality, epistemic communities are regional in scope, “diverse in their membership and sources of knowledge, and dynamic in their ability to withstand shocks, continuously learn, and adjust over time” (Benner and Pastor 2015, 3). Diversity in this context refers both to the variety of policy fields of professionals and to the different lived experiences that inform the perspectives of participants of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. 3 Developing a shared knowledge base through the “full and equal participation of non-‘expert’ stakeholders in the earliest stages of issue framing and agenda setting” is key to their framework (Benner and Pastor 2015, 15). Urban planning is a normative field in which professionals have a “responsibility to represent and advance the interests of society’s disadvantaged in the face of power” (American Institute of Certified Planners 2016). In the ideal proposed by Benner and Pastor (2015, 3), diverse epistemic communities “help construct and sustain regional social norms that facilitate the achievement of growth, resilience, and inclusion.”
Developing an internally cohesive, influential regional network does not necessarily follow from recognizing that an issue is bigger than a single field or group. Networks need an impetus to form, and they need shared reference points to maintain their connection over time. Crosby and Bryson (2010), who study cross-sector collaboration in general, argue that upheaval and competition motivate professionals to build networks across fields, often with prompting from leaders. Benner and Pastor theorize that cross-sector epistemic communities form in regions when there is “complexity and uncertainty” about an issue, leading planners and others to look outside of their immediate field for partners who can help define and attack a problem (Benner and Pastor 2015, 197). Yet having a problem that is too abstract or a time horizon for addressing it that is too long can provide too vague an incentive, hindering the formation or effectiveness of an epistemic community. Furthermore, if there is no tangible forum or process for working together, a regional cross-sector network might simply share knowledge without shifting outcomes or remaining cohesive over time, e.g., Benner and Pastor mention the power of regional government or an influential regional governance body to spur regionalism (Benner and Pastor 2015, 200). Where these are lacking, incentives from higher levels of government, such as a federal program, have the potential to spur regionalism.
Much of the literature on collaborative networks in regions relies on cases without deep schisms along political or racial lines, raising questions about whether some form of homogeneity is necessary for collaboration. For instance, the early literature on collaborative planning drew largely from the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a strong regional identity despite its fragmentation, a long history of regional initiatives, and a state government that generally supports regional initiatives (Innes 1996; Innes and Booher 1999; Innes and Rongerude 2013). In Just Growth, Benner and Pastor (2012) examine epistemic communities in Kansas City, Jacksonville, Nashville, and Columbus—a set of relatively homogeneous, medium-sized cities. Furthermore, the focus tends to be on factors that promote collaboration within regions, rather than the larger context of structures and incentives that bring actors together across professional and jurisdictional boundaries.
Multi-level Governance
Metropolitan regions in the United States consist of many overlapping political and administrative boundaries and, with a few exceptions, have no designated regional government. A variety of local governments, special districts, and regional agencies with territories that do not nest neatly have authority over different policy issues (Barbour 2002; Teitz 2012). Often the entity governing one type of policy, say transportation, is responsible for a different geographical area than, for example, the electrical utilities, water districts, or local housing authorities (Burns 1994; Mullin 2009). Federal and state funding that flows to these separate entities often finds little coordination in metropolitan regions. A key goal of the SCI-RPG was to increase coordination across policy issues within a metropolitan area, and therefore the efficiency of federal spending in regions.
Political scientists have long complicated accounts of regional collaboration by pointing out that in addition to horizontal networks of actors, governance typically involves some kind of structure from public sector actors at higher levels, or multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2003; Weir, Rongerude, and Ansell 2009). Mandates and incentives from higher levels of government can transform institutional relationships and shift localist behavior patterns (Mattiuzzi 2016). For instance, state policies or programs can increase interdependence among regional actors, thereby bolstering regional governance, if they require a degree of regional collaboration (Mattiuzzi 2020). By providing incentives to engage actors across both policy and jurisdictional boundaries, the SCI-RPG program created regional governance where, in some cases, none had existed. We explore how this multi-level process worked in the following sections.
About the SCI-RPG
In 2009, the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) formed the Partnership for Sustainable Communities (Partnership) to create a more efficient and effective federal presence in metropolitan regions. The Partnership’s Livability Principles encompassed economic sustainability and growth; social equity and the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups in governance and the economy; environmental sustainability; and the convergence of these three areas through investment in regionally efficient land use, transportation, and housing development. The Partnership spurred several new programs, including a one-of-a-kind regional planning grant. Past research has explored how SCI-RPG grantees approached the concepts of livability (Gough 2015), sustainability (Gough and Reece 2017), and equity (Chapple and Mattiuzzi 2013; Zapata and Bates 2017). Yet examinations of the SCI-RPG tend to focus on regions with supportive state governments or comparatively strong economies (Arias, Draper-Zivetz, and Martin 2017; Finio et al. 2019). 4
The SCI-RPG was a unique experiment that used federal assistance to encourage comprehensive regional planning by diverse actors. The program competitively awarded $165 million to seventy-four regions across the United States, as well as $10 million for capacity building and technical assistance by national nonprofits. Federal funding that reaches urban areas is typically formula- and/or place-based, or is allocated to specific programs by state bureaucracies. The SCI-RPG specifically worked to overcome the traditional divisions (and competition) between local jurisdictions and departments by encouraging regional leadership and diverse partners to develop and implement a shared vision for their region. A majority of the consortium leads were regional agencies such as an MPO, COG, or EDD (Heberle et al. 2017), although the geographic definition of the consortium sometimes exceeded that of the lead organization. Required grant consortium members included at least one regional agency, a principal city or county, a nonprofit or university partner, and jurisdictions representing at least half of the region’s population. The SCI-RPG sidestepped the typical competition between a principal city, its suburbs, and regional agencies for competitive grants, making it a truly regional experiment.
Survey results suggest that the SCI-RPG program generated new, diverse, and durable collaborations and strengthened relationships across sectors and jurisdictions. A survey of the seventy-four grantee regions (fifty-six respondents, 76% response rate) found considerable evidence of collaboration (Chapple, Mattiuzzi, and Gough 2017; Mattiuzzi 2017). For instance, because of the program’s requirements, lead grantees began new partnerships with other health, economic development, and private sector organizations (Table 1). More than a third of respondents reported that these new partnerships continued beyond the grant period to a great or very great extent 5 ; although regular meetings disappeared, partners continued to collaborate on economic development, grant-writing for plan implementation, and other topics.
New Partnerships (n = 56).
Source: Adapted from Mattiuzzi (2017).
Note: Survey question 6 read “With which of the following organizations have you formed new partnerships as a result of the SCI process? Check all that apply.” Responses were coded. SCI = Sustainable Communities Initiative.
Survey results also indicate that the grant program improved relationships between regional agencies and local governments, whether they were initially strong or not—an example of an intangible product from a planning process (Figure 1). Still, not every regional consortium had partners from all of the possible sectors that the grant intended to convene. In particular, the survey found that some regions’ implementation efforts lacked involvement from some jurisdictions, universities, community groups, and philanthropies which could have made significant contributions; processes were inclusive, but perhaps not inclusive enough (Table 2).
Improvement of relationships (n = 46).
Missing Partners (n = 40).
Source: Adapted from Mattiuzzi (2017).
Note: Survey question 12 read “Please list 3–5 (or more) organizations that might be able to contribute to discussions related to implementation of your regional plan but are currently not.” Responses were coded. SCI-RPG = Sustainable Communities Initiative Regional Planning Grant.
Research Questions and Hypotheses
For some regions, the SCI-RPG dovetailed with existing MPO- or state-driven regional planning (Trapenberg Frick et al. 2015), but others did not have this or other favorable conditions that promote regional governance. What accounts for signs of ongoing collaboration in unlikely regions? What experiences did their consortia have and what actions did they take that would not be elicited by a survey? We weigh two competing hypotheses: (1) that a grant from a higher level of government could by itself spur an epistemic community to form and outlive the funding incentive that brought people to the table in an “unlikely” region, versus (2) that there were actions taken by the consortia in our case regions and ways they interacted with the grant, beyond just the incentive of having funding to prepare a regional plan, from which we can learn about the formation and maintenance of regional knowledge networks. To explore these hypotheses, we examine how three regions without certain structural advantages developed and maintained epistemic communities. We consider what actions the regional consortia took as part of the grant process and what role multi-level governance (through the federal grant) might have played in spurring the formation of an epistemic community that is diverse, inclusive, and potentially lasting. We then compare these three regions with an “unlikely” region that also received the grant but did not form a lasting epistemic community.
Method
Our previous survey of the seventy-four grantee regions allowed us to identify a pool of regions that may have formed an epistemic community that outlived the incentive of the grant funding. This determination was based on consortium leaders’ responses to questions about whether they had improved relationships through the grant process and whether they had continued any new relationships they had formed. We used other sources of publicly-available data (described below) to make a second list of regions that faced barriers to forming an epistemic community and could therefore have been considered “unlikely” to do so from the outset. We selected our three cases from the overlap in these two lists, with input from HUD staff on which of our potentially epistemic community–forming, “unlikely” regions had finalized and begun to implement their plan. We also used conversations with HUD staff and our survey data to identify and provide evidence from an unlikely region that did not form a lasting epistemic community or implement the grant, despite the federal incentive. 6
We interviewed federal officials who had provided technical assistance to SCI-RPG grantee regions. From August to December 2016, we conducted seventeen interviews, mostly in person, with current and former federal officials at HUD, DOT, and EPA who were involved in the Partnership. Interviewees shared examples of regions that had a strong level of engagement with the grant process. Following this, we developed a set of case selection metrics.
We looked for regions that, when compared with other SCI-RPG grantees, lacked the structural advantages of a large population, a strong regional economy (as measured by gross domestic product growth for the public and private sector from 2010–2014), and a strong history of regional planning (based on interviews with federal officials and our own research). We used opposite party control of the state legislature from how the metro area voted in the 2008 presidential election as a proxy for potentially adversarial state–metro relations or state preemption on regional planning issues.
We selected three regions for in-depth case studies, each of which had a source of conflict or fragmentation that it overcame to form a stronger, more inclusive epistemic community than it had prior to the SCI-RPG grant process. From January to May 2017, we conducted thirty-seven interviews, nearly all in person, with individuals who worked on three SCI-RPG consortia: the New River Valley region of southeastern Virginia, whose consortium was led by the New River Valley Regional Commission (NRVRC); the Shelby County–led consortium in the Memphis metropolitan region of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi; and the consortium led by the East Arkansas Planning and Development District (EAPDD) in Arkansas.
We selected interviewees to represent epistemic community members from different levels of government and different sectors, including business, academia, regional government, local government, nonprofits, and philanthropy. We contacted some interviewees based on our own research and contacts from federal officials, and others based on a snowball sample of recommendations from other interviewees (Yin 2017). We deliberately sought out interviewees who had varying levels of investment in the outcomes of the grant, from regional leaders who might be more disposed to take a positive view, to more peripheral actors, especially those who were critical of the process.
Our case regions were “unlikely” candidates for epistemic community formation because of their size, economic profile, and institutional history, including jurisdictional fragmentation. Shelby County historically had a lack of cooperation between its whiter suburbs and more African American principal city of Memphis; East Arkansas traditionally lacked cooperation across county lines; and the New River Valley had a conflict over its grant involving self-described “Tea Party” property rights activists that reflected the divide between the region’s rural communities and its independent university towns. Furthermore, our case regions’ state governments did not mandate regional sustainability planning.
Many regions that grew their epistemic communities under the SCI-RPG brought in new players, such as the business community, and adopted a plan (Mattiuzzi 2017); these three regions did as well. But the similarities mostly end there. None of these three regions have comparatively large regional populations, high median incomes, or a large African American middle class, all factors that correlate with epistemic community formation (Benner and Pastor 2012; Chapple et al. 2017). Yet all three of these regions show signs of implementing the plans that they developed through the SCI-RPG, a key measure of the robustness of the ongoing partnerships they report having developed, and of the effectiveness of the grant (Hexter and Kaufman 2017; Kaufman 2016). If we can pinpoint the dynamics of epistemic community formation and durability in these unlikely regions—what Becker (2008) calls the “trick of ‘finding what doesn’t fit’”—then we can extend our understanding of the conditions under which regional knowledge communities form.
Setting the Table for Inclusive Epistemic Communities
Each case presented below offers a different example of how multi-level governance from HUD created an incentive for the formation of an epistemic community—and a regional vision. In the New River Valley, HUD helped local actors adapt their process to include more voices. In Memphis, HUD rules for inclusive participation helped bridge the city–suburb divide. In East Arkansas, the data collection and dialogues required by the grant forged new bonds across sectors and geographies. Given the fragmentation, limited history of regional governance, and economic challenges in these regions, we assess whether these outcomes would have occurred without the SCI-RPG grant.
The New River Valley
The New River Valley is a green, hilly region in southwest Virginia with a small, predominantly white population of about 183,000. The region has roots in coal mining, although today the biggest employers are in education, health care, and auto manufacturing. It is home to the largest Volvo truck manufacturing facility in the world, which is the second largest employer in the region after Virginia Tech.
The New River Valley SCI-RPG consortium defined their regional geography as the four counties served by the NRVRC: Pulaski, Floyd, Montgomery, and Giles Counties. The NRVRC is a COG and the region’s designated EDD. The grant consortium included the region’s cities (which in Virginia are independent from counties), several towns, its MPO, Virginia Tech, several nonprofits, and the region’s HOME consortium (which receives federal housing funding). The region does not have a large urban center or a strong history of collaboration occurring across county lines. For example, each county has traditionally pursued its own tourist-attraction strategy, despite their shared natural beauty and proximity to two national forests and the Appalachian Trail.
The New River Valley has an aging, primarily rural population and struggles with high levels of childhood poverty, obesity, and opioid-related issues. Housing affordability issues have added to the difficulty of attracting and retaining younger workers. Levels of trust in government among residents, many of whom hold strong property rights and anti-federal control views, have historically been low, an issue that arose during the SCI-RPG planning process. The SCI-RPG process provided a boundary experience for residents and planners to define the region’s problems, and potential solutions, across different perspectives.
The SCI-RPG provided an incentive for diverse regional players to engage in an inclusive process for generating shared understandings of regional problems. The grant’s public participation requirement helped bring new voices and partners into regional planning. Initially, however, many community members, including a large number who described their ideas and activities as part of the Tea Party movement (Trapenberg Frick 2013), challenged the process as it was unfolding. This group saw regional sustainability planning as a potential threat to their private property rights. For example, one community member who had participated throughout the grant process shared that he felt that planners “wanted to have restrictions on where people can live . . . [and] how much energy you can use” (Author interview). With support from HUD, consortium leaders redesigned meetings to be more interactive and to have time for comments that were not directly related to the agenda. NRVRC appealed to grant managers at HUD and received permission to take extra time to surface local understandings of regional sustainability. By listening to community voices, and showing that there were no closed-door meetings, the regional agency salvaged the process that early on had been characterized by suspicion and disruption. Although the grant process did not lead to complete consensus, most community members no longer saw the grant as a threat.
Surprisingly, flexibility from HUD was an important component of the multi-level governance that enabled and incented regional knowledge community formation in the New River Valley. A HUD official said that without making the table more inclusive, the grant process in the New River Valley was in danger of collapsing (Author interview). HUD intended for SCI-RPG consortia to define goals around the federal Livability Principles early in the process. After a rocky start, however, New River Valley consortium leaders pushed back on HUD’s timeline and its top-down goals. The HUD official further noted that, unlike some regions, New River Valley did not start with “a year’s worth of pre-existing community process that they’re building off of” (Author interview). It became clear that consortium leaders “do really need to get in there and figure out what people’s priorities are and not presuppose them at the beginning,” leading HUD to “let them be very flexible . . . and very focused on ‘at the end of this we will have a plan’ in a way that normally would make government uncomfortable” (Author interview). Although the SCI-RPG provided the conditions for a new, inclusive epistemic community—a forum for repeated interaction between expert and non-expert actors on a cross-section of regional policy issues, a defined time horizon for action, and a funding incentive to develop an inclusive regional plan—it would have fallen flat in this unlikely region without an iterative approach from HUD. Multi-level governance led to greater adaptiveness.
The regional sustainability grant generated new collaborations between government and philanthropy in the New River Valley, two sectors with an interest in but little previous collaboration on issues affecting low-income seniors. The NRVRC, the Area Agency on Aging, the HOME consortium, and the philanthropic sector now work collaboratively on the “aging in place” component of the regional plan developed under the SCI-RPG. This includes retrofitting homes for mobility, reducing home energy costs, and creating senior housing near local amenities. The New River Valley Community Foundation developed a new donor fund in conjunction with the local Habitat for Humanity chapter that provides up to $5,000 for home modifications and energy upgrades for low-income older adults. Thus, the SCI-RPG provided an incentive for philanthropy to work on regional issues that surfaced during the regional planning process in addition to their long-standing work on service provision for basic needs.
New public sector and public–private initiatives emerged based on the issues surfaced through the SCI-RPG process in the New River Valley. The Area Agency on Aging developed a no-payment rural rideshare program (Bliss 2017; Higginbotham 2000) that addresses senior mobility and isolation. The program operates using a “time bank” that allows local residents to trade rides for goods and services, or bank their credits for when they are older and need a ride themselves. The grant process also led to a public–private partnership to develop an old elementary school site called Prices Fork (the district built an expanded school elsewhere) into mixed-income senior housing and an incubator for food-based businesses. 7
The New River Valley generated new regional partnerships and a sense of cross-jurisdictional interdependence on drug-related issues and childcare access through complementary processes of data collection and bottom-up issue framing. For example, the regional dialogue surfaced community concerns about the secondary impacts of opioid use on families and employment. One participant said that previously there were concerns about any kind of data mapping endeavor singling out families who make frequent emergency calls in small towns and rural areas where everyone knows everyone (Author interview). The regional dialogue helped reframe drug issues as a community problem, not just a personal one, leading to changes in data collection and social service deployment. A county government began to map frequent emergency service visits, layered with data on issues such as lead paint in homes, to guide their work and engage in “more preventative infusing of money” in a way that is now “costing the county less” (Author interview). This program, as well as a drug court, have been replicated across county lines, in part due to the increased regional communication produced by the grant process. In addition, the SCI-RPG process drew attention to the lack of childcare options in the region. According to one participant, “ . . . businesses are seeing from their end [that] they can’t get qualified workers because of the daycare shortage” (Author interview). The shared understanding of access to childcare as an employment issue helped bring private sector partners to the table. In both cases, participants saw how one jurisdiction, service agency, or sector’s actions affected outcomes for other regional actors.
Memphis–Shelby County
On the banks of the Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee, sits at the confluence of three states in the Mid-South. The City of Memphis and Shelby County, despite sharing many functions, have historically been at odds with one another. However, they share an Office of Sustainability, which led the three-state SCI-RPG consortium. The consortium defined its region as four counties in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. In addition to Memphis and Shelby County, consortium members included the Memphis and West Memphis (Arkansas) MPOs, a foundation, several nonprofits, county governments, and a number of cities and towns in the region.
The region’s population of 1.1 million people is 47% black and 44% white, with a large gap in median income between whites and other racial and ethnic groups. FedEx, which is headquartered in Memphis with its world hub near the airport, is the region’s largest employer. Health care is the region’s leading industry, and the Medical District near downtown Memphis draws patients from across state lines. Low levels of collaboration have long been the norm between Memphis and its surrounding suburbs. In addition, levels of trust between government and predominantly African American and low-income communities such as the neighborhoods of north Memphis have historically been low. The SCI-RPG process began to address jurisdictional fragmentation and its contribution to racial conflict and inequality in the region.
The structure of the SCI-RPG helped chip away at long-standing regional rivalries in our case regions. In the Memphis region, the requirement that consortia be geographically representative helped overcome divisions between the city of Memphis and its suburban and rural surroundings. Under the grant, consortium partners developed a regional plan called the Greenprint, which led them to extend the city–suburb connections in their regional rails-to-trails system, the Greenline. One participant said that . . . some of the more rural cities . . . tended to be the ones that had the most concerns . . . They think that some of these greenways would increase crime, they think it will increase trespassing on their property, [or even that] . . . greenways could be a way for people to poison their livestock.
Fear of crime, often with racial overtones, is a classic objection to everything from light rail to sidewalks. Although a previous trail proposal never made it past the drawing board, the Greenprint plan provided a boundary object for developing shared perspectives across the region. Once people saw it implemented, the Greenline trail became so popular that ongoing planning work now focuses on reducing its potential contribution to displacement of residents in Memphis’s low-income neighborhoods.
Philanthropic involvement in the SCI-RPG helped reduce rivalries among nonprofits in the Memphis region. Federal officials encouraged but did not require partnerships with philanthropy (HUD 2016). One participant in the Memphis consortium noted that the Hyde Foundation . . . did a lot of work to get the different players in that area to come to the table and play nice . . . A lot of . . . organizations . . . felt like they were competing with each other, not necessarily wanting to sit at the same table for fear of losing out on a funding source. I think Hyde being one of the main conveners of that was important for those organizations . . . [to see that] the bigger picture is regional connectivity.
Philanthropy can be a politically-neutral yet locally-grounded convener, and has the longevity to act as a long-term champion for regional initiatives. The structure provided by regional-scale philanthropies through the grant incentives helped normalize regional collaboration, with shared regional goals, among local nonprofits.
The SCI-RPG helped align public, private, and philanthropic notions of regional sustainability in the Memphis region. According to one participant, the Hyde Foundation has “ . . . continued to fund projects like the Shelby Farms Greenline and Shelby Farms Park renovations” in part because it has aligned its priorities with the Greenprint plan (Author interview). Community projects can apply to become “Greenprint certified” by the County Office of Sustainability, which the Hyde Foundation now takes into account when considering grant applications (Author interview). According to one observer, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce is working to “advance greenspace to attract and retain talent. They’re specifically looking to help implement the Greenprint as part of that” (Author interview). The Chamber also has an initiative to reduce inequality in the region through small business development, consistent with Greenprint goals. The SCI-RPG process increased collaboration across sectors, which has contributed to the Memphis region’s success in attracting federal disaster resilience funding and national philanthropic funding for neighborhood revitalization that builds on the SCI-RPG model of regional dialogue and collaboration (Author interview, Choi 2019).
East Arkansas
The East Arkansas region, with a population of roughly 390,000, spans twelve counties in the Mississippi River Delta, nestled between the Ozark Mountains to the west, the Missouri border to the north, and Tennessee and Mississippi to the east. The EAPDD, an EDD, led the consortium. Memphis, Tennessee, is perhaps an even greater cultural and commercial center for East Arkansas than the region’s largest city, Jonesboro, which is home to Arkansas State University. Jonesboro has an emergent bicycle advocacy community, although railroad tracks largely prevent bike and pedestrian access between town and university (Author interview). Outside of Jonesboro, the neoclassical columns of regional bank branches and water towers lettered with town names are the most prominent landmarks dotting the agricultural landscape. Agriculture and food processing are major local industries. East Arkansas’s farms supply Memphis’s farmers markets and restaurants, and there has been collaboration between the two adjacent regions on a healthy food plan in conjunction with their SCI-RPG efforts. Yet lack of access to fresh food and obesity-related health problems are widespread in East Arkansas. The region has a strong history of counties working individually on economic development, but barriers to workforce development and retention, such as transportation, housing, and workforce training, affect the entire region. Like Memphis, East Arkansas has a history of racial inequality, although its nonwhite population (29% of residents) is smaller. School closures have accelerated decline in some small towns, where local pride runs deep, and competition with other towns and counties for jobs and resources has long been the norm. The SCI-RPG provided a venue for divergent towns and counties to articulate shared problems.
In East Arkansas, the SCI-RPG data collection requirement helped create a shared understanding of regional sustainability and cross-jurisdictional interdependence in terms of the relationship between cost of living and the long-term economic health of the region. Prior to the SCI-RPG, many elected officials and business leaders had little or no idea that there were working-age residents who did not have access to cars in the region (Author interview). Data collection required by the grant helped reframe housing as an economic development issue. Although typically thought of as an urban issue, a lack of housing that is affordable to workers, including multi-family housing, affects rural areas as well. According to one participant, when a large new food processing plant opened in East Arkansas, “ . . . one of the real issues was housing” (Author interview). The grant process spurred conversations on the impact of housing availability on local employers’ ability to hire. One participant summed up the regional nature of housing constraints when new jobs arrive: “Basically, if you don’t have the housing [in your county], you’re not going to get the economic impact because people are going to come from somewhere else instead, and . . . take their paycheck home.” “ . . . There’s been real effort to get some apartment development . . . and I would bet that [local leaders] would not have thought that way prior to this [grant process].” The SCI-RPG dialogue helped reframe the issue of housing affordability as vital to economic and workforce development, as well as building the local tax base and reducing retail leakage. After seeing the housing data collected through the grant process, local leaders began to see housing affordability as an issue of attracting and retaining companies and workers to strengthen their regional economy.
The shared knowledge developed through the grant process about the ways they are interdependent has helped reduce some of the competition between local jurisdictions to attract employers. Said one participant, after the SCI-RPG process, localities are . . . not so competitive. What [investment] goes in one county can actually be helpful to them in their county, because now they know and they’ve seen it quantified that 25% of the workers in one county may come from their county, meaning they bring that paycheck home to their county. So therefore, if anything else happens in a neighboring county, it’s going to be the same percentage [benefit to them], at least statistically. (Author interview)
The grant funding provided an incentive for collecting the data. The data collection process provided a boundary experience through which local actors came to a shared understanding of what the data meant for the region across different sectors and county lines.
Undertaking local data collection through the grant helped city and county officials understand their areas of economic interdependence. This new understanding of regional economic benefits from new jobs ran contrary to the usual “smokestack chasing” and competition for state and federal infrastructure dollars. For example, through the SCI-RPG process, regional players in East Arkansas began to see that funding for a highway off-ramp near a facility in the neighboring town or county will benefit them. Municipalities that typically compete for infrastructure investment have begun to cooperate more. Said one participant in the regional consortium, people have figured out that working as a region . . . makes their chances for getting a grant better . . . For instance . . . if there is a conglomerate of small towns that develop one water system, USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] is going to look at that and say “okay, taxpayers from three towns are all going to support and sustain and maintain this water system” . . . So over the years one of our big things was to stress regionalism and help people understand why it’s important to help your neighbor, . . . that working regionally does not hurt their pocketbook, it potentially would help it. (Author interview)
As a traditionally business-oriented region, even a small shift toward seeing infrastructure or jobs locating in another jurisdiction as a benefit to one’s own jurisdiction is a big step.
The SCI-RPG’s local data collection process helped EAPDD build its role as a trusted repository for local data that can be used to help attract employers and state and federal funding. One participant shared that local participation in data collection helped local officials understand the importance of capturing this in the first place . . . because . . . when somebody else just does it for them they may be thankful, but they don’t always have an appreciation for what it took or how it’s used. (Author interview)
Local input in data collection for the grant helped expose inaccuracies in commercial data on local businesses, such as the number of grocery stores in a particular town (Author interview). “Instead of getting upset with . . . the data that they know is wrong, [local governments] would recognize that they have a role in this, that they need to have the right information on their website” (Author interview). Although local governments do not have the capacity for the same amount of data collection required by the grant on a long-term basis, their involvement in the process built their trust in EAPDD’s role providing similar data going forward.
Sustaining Epistemic Communities and Implementing Regional Plans
The space for open dialogue created by the grant, the opportunity to coalesce around issues of shared regional importance that its data collection requirement fostered, and the flexibility to use this information to define sustainability goals locally helped generate trust and emergent epistemic communities in our case regions. In this environment, “champions” for implementation emerged at “backbone” organizations who would carry the goals of their regional plans forward after the end of the grant’s incentive funding (Kania and Kramer 2011; Marsh 2014; Reece and Gough 2019). Formal, planning-based processes can be catalytic for the development of an epistemic community, but they are not enough to sustain one over time; having repeated interaction over time around action-oriented goals is key to the dynamism and longevity of an epistemic community (Benner and Pastor 2015).
In each of the three case regions, responsibility for implementing the regional plan developed under the SCI-RPG has been taken up by a “backbone” organization from the original consortium. In East Arkansas, EAPDD has continued to be that backbone organization and a trusted source of data in the region. In the New River Valley, the NRVRC continues to be a data repository, but another consortium member has taken up the lead role in implementation. The Community Foundation of the New River Valley funds a position dedicated to coordinating implementation of the regional plan. The NRVRC also helps maintain the epistemic community by providing venues for new generations of local staff and elected officials to learn about the regional plan and by facilitating cooperation and program replication across county lines. In Memphis, a full-time implementation position was jointly funded by the County Office of Sustainability and the Chamber of Commerce for two years after the grant ended. As in the New River Valley, the individual who filled the implementation-oriented position was previously at the regional agency and was central to the development of the plan. Many grantee regions had trouble finding funding for staff time or a position to implement the plan once the SCI-RPG was over. In these three regions, the public, philanthropic, and private sectors were invested enough to make that commitment—more evidence that the grant made a difference.
Exploring an SCI Region that Did Not Form an Epistemic Community
We used our survey data and interviews with HUD staff to explore the possibility that an “unlikely” region could have formed an epistemic community and implemented the grant without some of the characteristics that we identified as aiding that process in our case study regions (Chapple, Mattiuzzi, and Gough 2017; Mattiuzzi 2017; Author interviews). These characteristics include having an open and inclusive planning process that helps build trust with the community, having a strong data collection process that helps build partnerships with diverse agencies and organizations, and having a “champion” at a “backbone organization” driving implementation. It is possible that another region formed an epistemic community without these characteristics, but in the data that we have (survey responses and comments), there is no evidence of that. At the level of the survey results (without an in-depth case study), there did not seem to be any region that formed a lasting epistemic community but that did not have the characteristics of the regions we studied.
An SCI-RPG consortium leader in the western United States (region A) 8 reported through our survey instrument that the relationships that their organization forged or improved upon during the grant process did not continue beyond the grant period in any meaningful way, leading us to conclude that they did not form a lasting epistemic community. 9 They reported that they previously had weak relationships with local governments, but that several new local governments had joined their regional organization as members as a result of the grant, suggesting that a potential epistemic community failed to launch. Region A had similar economic challenges, income inequality, and jurisdictional fragmentation to our three case regions, suggesting that it too faced long odds to forming an epistemic community.
Region A did not share the experiences of our case regions in several key regards. Data collection was not an area that brought partners together in their region: “learning about better data sources and/or analytical tools” was not cited as a grant outcome.
10
They were not able to designate an organization (or individual at an organization) to champion implementation, stating in the survey comments that The . . . perception that [the SCI] was a big-government effort to undermine local control ended up poisoning the outcome. In a community with very few resources that it can task for implementation, no one will take on the challenge to pursue SCI-related goals when it means that the project automatically comes with the added burden of a motivated anti-planning constituency that is going to fight against it no matter what . . . Just partnering with the Federal government on the SCI efforts has resulted in a new anti-planning faction in the community that opposes everything related to planning regardless of intent or origin. From that vantage point, SCI was a net loss to our community.
This comment also reveals the challenges that region A had gaining trust from the community.
Region A experienced their relationship with HUD during the grant period differently, which contributed to their inability to build a regional network around the plan. Although having flexible support at HUD helped the New River Valley engage in an inclusive process that built trust in a region with vocal opposition to a federal sustainability program, region A reported that they did not experience this flexibility. According to a HUD staff member, opposition to the planning process in region A stymied efforts to build partnerships and develop a plan with community support (Author interview). Region A’s consortium lead commented that If the program had been run out of the regional or state offices, rather than out of HUD headquarters, the entire process would have been smoother. More importantly, the ability of the SCI program to comprehend, adapt to, and support local needs and conditions would have been tremendously [improved].
Region A never got to the point of defining their goals locally, stating in survey comments that “SCI goals are urban-centric and do not fit truly rural realities very well.” Because their SCI-RPG process broke down in the discussion and participation phase, region A also did not have the opportunity to engage in shared data collection, which Benner and Pastor (2015) note is an important component of epistemic community formation.
Despite the incentive of the SCI grant, region A was not able to build community trust, which prevented them from building partnerships that would carry them through to implementation. For our case region consortia, the grant provided enough of an incentive such that, along with flexible HUD support, they were able to initiate processes that brought disparate groups to the table, including those opposed to possible goals of the grant. Among these processes were having inclusive meetings and broad-based data collection. These allowed our case region consortia to build on and develop working relationships and trust, paving the way for ongoing relationships and plan implementation spearheaded by a regional champion or backbone organization. In region A, the grant was an insufficient incentive; against the backdrop of an early and persistent lack of trust, the consortium was not able to establish the open meetings, shared data collection, and path to cultivating an implementation champion. More research would be needed to understand the exact dynamics of what occurred in the region; however, it is clear that region A was unable to start a conversation that could have generated momentum for the development of a plan with broad support and a regional knowledge community with an interest in implementing the plan.
Conclusion
In each of the case regions detailed here, the federal grant program helped spark diverse regional knowledge networks focused on sustainability in regions that previously lacked them. The emergence of these “epistemic communities” was all the more surprising because the case regions faced economic, social, and jurisdictional barriers to regional governance. Despite city–suburb fragmentation, the Memphis–Shelby County consortium had the advantage of defining the boundaries of their region—and building support for a regional initiative—around a large urban center. The New River Valley and East Arkansas were already “regions” in the sense of having a unified geography and overlapping economic and social interests, but their individual counties (and independent cities in the New River Valley) had strong identities and local politics that previously obscured their shared interests.
In each case region, community members and professionals came to the table because of the attractiveness of the grant money, but other factors helped see them through to implementation. The grant’s community input process built trust through repeated interaction that surfaced regional problems and goals. The hands-on support of HUD staff, in some cases with added encouragement about defining goals locally, helped overcome hurdles to building that trust. The grant’s data collection process introduced new knowledge about regional interdependence. That knowledge became embedded in local dialogue through repeated interaction about what it meant, whether it was accurate, and what to do with it (Benner and Pastor 2015; Innes and Booher 2010). This shared knowledge, and the sense of a shared destiny that it created among jurisdictions, institutions, and individuals about their collective regional trajectory—from attracting jobs to retaining talent to providing stable housing for seniors—became the basis for an epistemic community. The trust built through the community visioning meetings, the data collection process, and the interactions around “reality-checking” those data set the stage for ongoing interaction and implementation of the grant.
At the time of the SCI-RPG application process, a number of the seventy-four grantee regions—Sacramento, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, to name a few—had years of public sector efforts to build regional governance around equitable smart growth and economic sustainability behind them (Trapenberg Frick et al. 2015; Benner and Pastor 2015). In these regions, the SCI-RPG provided a boost for existing or nascent epistemic communities to develop and move forward with their work. The three case regions presented here—the New River Valley, Memphis Shelby County, and East Arkansas—arguably did not have this experience to build on, and faced additional barriers. An incentive grant by itself is not sufficient to overcome deep differences and create an epistemic community, as the counterexample presented in the previous section shows. But in the cases of the New River Valley, Memphis-Shelby County, and East Arkansas, a thoughtful and open process for community input, with support from HUD staff, opened up the potential for regional actors to develop shared understandings of the usefulness and meaning of data and to find the points on which they depend on each other. These regions continued the networks they built through the grant and began to implement their plans because of the trust created through these processes for which the grant created space and an impetus to collaborate. In one “unlikely” region (region A) that received the grant but lacked the characteristics that we observed in the three case regions—persistent local staff, a robust data collection process, for example—an epistemic community did not form to implement the regional plan beyond the grant period. This suggests that the grant incentive alone did not spark lasting epistemic communities, but that supportive multi-level governance can play an important role.
The success of our case regions was due in no small part to the type of planners and other community development professionals who championed the grant process. They were dogged in bringing their communities together and in engaging with HUD. Had they simply followed the script—conducted the necessary meetings and accepted the grant conditions as they were handed down from a higher level of government—they might not have succeeded. From our observations of this diverse set of regions, we conclude that important characteristics of a regionally-minded planner, whatever their job title, include thinking creatively about the tools they are given and not giving up when their first attempts fail. Furthermore, the planners who made the SCI-RPG a success thought beyond the subject area of their jobs, whether it was land use, environmental sustainability, economic development, or social equity, to see the connections between these issues at a regional scale. They sought out partners from across subfields and geographic boundaries, and they developed partnerships that led to a smooth handoff to a new backbone organization or allowed them to continue the goals of the grant within their agencies.
In our case regions, the grant process became a “boundary process” for diverse participants to develop and sustain shared understandings of what issues bound their jurisdictions and institutions together as a region through the “boundary object” of the regional plan. Areas of agreement and action in our case regions included addressing the opioid epidemic, aging in place, childcare to improve business productivity, affordable housing for workers, and green space to attract and retain workers. In the New River Valley, local goal setting helped salvage a controversial grant process and create an ongoing collaboration for addressing housing security for seniors at a regional level. In Memphis, the socially-divided city and its suburbs have become physically more connected by a regional trail system, while the nonprofit community has become more collaborative. In East Arkansas, competitive local jurisdictions and business leaders came to see affordable housing and infrastructure spending as a collective economic development win. In each case, the grant process exposed issues of cross-jurisdictional or cross-institutional interdependence on which local actors could not achieve a goal without regional governance.
The top-down structure of the Sustainable Communities grant—its mandate for a regional cross section of partners, community participation, and local data collection—was important to spurring ongoing collaboration in unlikely regions. Equally important was HUD’s ability to give regional stakeholders the flexibility to define sustainability issues locally; this resulted partly from the capacity to give attention to individual regions in a comparatively small grant cohort, a factor that would be difficult to replicate in other federal grants. Yet these findings suggest interesting possibilities for future federal (and state) incentive programs for regionalism. Federal programs that combine top-down conditions (such as diverse consortia and specific data collection, for example, on fair housing) with bottom-up priority setting can build local investment in outcomes while still satisfying overarching federal goals. When coupled with thoughtful local leadership, a flexible process for developing goals locally has the potential to promote sustainability and regional governance, even where these modalities are not yet well established. In a country where economic and cultural divides separate many communities from each other, a federal program can help clear a path for collaboration on intractable problems.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Ford and Surdna Foundations for their support of this research. We thank Andrea Fleck for excellent research assistance. We thank U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) staff who worked on the SCI, Michael Teitz, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: received financial support from the Ford Foundation and the Surdna Foundation for this research.