Inspired by “Frustrated Expectations”

Leaching Out Reform Expectations

What seems to have mattered, in the past, to Savitch and Adhikari is whether metropolitan-wide general purpose governments have been widely put into place. They observe that their desired outcome has not happened and that it is not in the offing. And so, hopes and expectations have been thwarted. “This context of frustrated expectations inspires our own research . . .”

We should take the authors at their word on this. They had hoped for and indeed expected something big and it did not happen. They have concluded that, whatever the strategies of activists might be, the goal and expectation of one big metro government must be put aside. They offer a conceptual path—not a reform agenda—forward: “fragmented regionalism.”

A useful element here is the authors’ implicit recognition that our thinking always rests on the perspectives we bring to bear. Therefore we—individually and collectively—are responsible to be vigilantly attentive to and critical of the substantive and normative qualities of those perspectives. We should rethink regularly.

Putting aside the metro government expectation seems apt and in keeping with important aspects of scholarship and practice over the past quarter century. Not everyone, of course, sought or expected a flowering of comprehensive metropolitan governments. (The “polycentrists” do not seem to share that goal at all.)

Leaching out the reform expectation is not a simple matter. Seeing what must be done does not guarantee that it will be done or be done thoroughly. The steadiness of the article’s conceptual argument suffers a bit in this regard.

The article, for example, characterizes the literature and the situation on the ground and finds both wanting. The authors report that the literature—from the “early scholarship” to monocentrists, polycentrists, and back-door regionalists—has been “often geared to political reform,” that is, to the quest for metropolitan governments. On the ground, despite “all the motion . . . there has been little, if any, real movement.” The country, they declare, “remains structurally unchanged.”

“Structurally unchanged” is a bit of rhetorical excess that contradicts the authors’ later claims about the rise of public authorities “to selectively fill integrative roles,” thus “obviating the need for comprehensive government” (!!) in the metropolitan governance context. “We should not underestimate,” they later say, “the advantages derived from having muddled through to this ‘solution.’” To this reader, this sounds like a significant structural change. The conceptual presentation, however, is not attentive because the shadow of an ideal metro government clouds the view. The messiness of the twenty-first century is, for better or worse, substantially different from the messiness to which the early reformers objected.

(Perhaps this is a good spot for me to acknowledge my own perspective. My “Confessions of a Messy Regionalist” [Citiwire, November 25, 2011] claims that the measure of regional governance is “marshaling the capacity to achieve a goal,” which may or may not involve structural change and likely not comprehensive structural change.)

A second example of the persistence in the article of the metro government ideal and its consequent critique of existing local governments is the claim that public authorities “were established precisely because local governments were not able to cooperate . . .” But many of those local governments helped or supported or acquiesced in the creation of public authorities. That is one way that they addressed—or claimed to address—the boundary-crossing issues that their areas confronted.

Savitch and Adhikari cannot quite shake off the underlying idea that local governments are merely and mainly obstacles to collective action. Consequently, they miss a fruitful line of investigation. Those local governments are also, intermittently and unsatisfactorily, often the means to collective action. (They are building fragmented regionalism.) “[N]ot able to collaborate” seems to mean that those governments refused to abolish themselves in favor of a metropolitan-wide entity. This is correct but does not get us very far. I do not mean that we lack a critical perspective from which to speak. The local governments are responsible for what they have done or allowed to be done or prevented from being done. Analysts surely should note, analyze, and criticize the cases where the process of creating the authorities and/or the results have been bad.

Ideas Matter

The article thus usefully reminds us that ideas, including implicit ones, matter. The structural reform framing of a good deal of the regionalism writing, academic and otherwise, has often clouded the effort to understand what has been actually happening on the ground. When the only thing that matters is one, big metro government, then anything short of that grail will be seen as inadequate and not quite worthy of attention. And because, on this view, metro government surely should happen, local leaders and scholars should support it. Opposition, political or analytic, should not happen or can therefore be seen as somehow suspect. When there are too many “shoulds,” acute observation suffers and insights are dulled.

A personal recollection may be permitted. In an open seminar talk at a big city university, participants included some faculty and some actors in the area’s regionalism scene. One person described agreements among about a dozen local government entities to create a bike and walking trail. Another person declared that this was “not regionalism” because it was not region-wide. A vigorous exchange ensued about what counts as “regionalism.” The opportunity to explore how and why that trail collaboration occurred, and what it meant, was lost.

Somewhat similarly, the bogeyman of metro government has sometimes functioned to darken prospects for any interlocal cooperation, any ceding of local “autonomy.” Or to put the point more sharply, conjuring the allegedly looming big, bad metro government possibility has often allowed opponents of a proposal to change the subject away from whether a particular problem was to be addressed.

Savitch and Adhikari outline the dimensions of the “inordinate tension between local and regional needs.” From that tension comes “fragmented regionalism,” which is their suggested framework for understanding government and governance in metropolitan areas. It is “a condition of piecemeal, partial and selective processes that induce some kind of a metropolitan-wide action while guaranteeing local prerogatives.”

One might pause over this definition. As in the bike trail story above, these “processes” might often be interlocal instead of “metropolitan-wide.”

Causes

What are the foundations or causes of fragmented regionalism? The article’s subtitle—“Why Metro America Continues to Splinter”—suggests that answering this question is what the article is for and about. Many—too many—answers are offered. Metropolitan areas have “a historically rooted system of local autonomy.” Although “historians attributed metropolitan fragmentation to the rise of suburbanization,” the authors believe that fragmentation “is not confined to a particular era of development.” Instead, it “is strongly associated with a number of other structural factors”: political incentives, economic requirements for highly specialized areas, and the success of public authorities. “Metropolitan splintering” is both “a circumstance of the past” and “an ongoing consequence of current practices.” In addition, “a more independently minded middle class with a capacity to protect its assets” pushes toward localism. Finally and most expansively, fragmentation is “endemic”; it (and “its attendant inequalities”) is “an outgrowth of modernity.”

It would have been worthwhile to sort out more rigorously this array of assertions. A more substantial engagement with previous efforts to address these matters might have brought more clarity to the discussion. The discussion, for example and importantly, lacks any specific mention or assessment of the effect of race and racism as factors that have influenced fragmentation.

The broad topic of economic “inequalities” threads through the article. There is, however, an ambiguity about their relation to fragmentation: Do inequalities cause, result from, or merely occur together with fragmentation? Regarding their analyses about public authorities, the authors state that they are not making “claims about the causal links” between their variables. In their first “observation” about these analyses, they report that fragmentation occurs “concomitantly” with greater inequalities, that is, they happen at the same time. At the conclusion of the article, the authors refer to “fragmentation and its attendant inequalities.” (My dictionaries say that “attendant” means “accompanying” and “accompanying or following as a result of.”) This topic is important enough to warrant careful word choices and some direct discussion in the conceptual argument.

Prospects

Presumably some or all of the factors the authors mention constitute the “strong institutional bases” in which they say local governments are “lodged” Without comparable or stronger institutional bases, movements for metropolitan government will not succeed. In short, as I understand this, the push toward local autonomy is stronger than the pull toward collective action. As the authors rather dramatically, enigmatically, and, I think, wrongly put it, “all the rest is postscript.” (Or, as the poet Keats wrote on a rather different topic, “that’s all you know and all you need to know.”)

For this reader, that’s a bit mechanical and it may be circular. Nonetheless, this push/pull setup, the invitation for calculating the relative strength of each impulse, the complicated ways they interact, and, perhaps by extension, the varying degrees and kinds of fragmentation that result could be worked up into a usable prescription for useful research in this arena. It could also be articulated to summarize what effective practitioners do.

The authors note that reform of fragmentation could be accomplished by “intercession” by state or Federal governments. With good reason, they do not tarry over this possibility. Neither the Feds nor the states have gone in much for such “intercession,” and there is no reason to believe that will change soon. As recently as 2008–2009, for example, regionalists were stimulated by candidate and then President Obama talking about regional governance and regional solutions. After only half a year in the White House, that talk, and a special Office into whose care it had been tendered, mostly disappeared.

We are, then, stuck with the complex, messy, and variably unsatisfactory condition of government and governance in metropolitan areas. That condition is perhaps not so very different from other aspects of government and governance in the United States. So, we carry on, trying to better understand what is going on and why and how. The better we understand, the better we might see how to improve.