Balancing Competing Interests in American Regional Governance

摘要：平衡美国地区治理中的利益冲突本项目将研究美国的地区治理。在地方一级作出的许多公共政策决定对其他政治管辖区的行为者都有影响，因此呼吁加强区域协调。然而，所有的区域治理努力都面临着一个根本性的紧张：地方政府必须放弃一些权力，以实现区域利益。然后，当地行为者可能会被其选民要求对区域结果负责。因此，地区主义迫使地方政府问：地区政策制定的预期地方利益是什么，这些好处与将权力下放给该地区的预期地方政治成本相比如何？换言之，可以提倡区域主义来解决本质上是经济的问题--外部性和规模经济--但其产出也应反映其成员的政治和经济利益以及这些利益的集合规则。该项目将审查区域治理努力的行动，并评估这些努力如何在区域和地方利益之间取得平衡。拟议的研究包括三个主要部分。首先，它借鉴了外部性、集体行动和决策的理论，产生了关于区域治理努力如何平衡地方和区域利益的假设。第二，它涉及建立和分析一个广泛的数据库，其中包括目前在美国运作的所有516个地区委员会。区域委员会是存在于48个州的一类区域治理努力，代表着区域治理的一种重要形式。该数据库将包括关于每个区域议会的活动、政策重点、预算、立法授权、历史、组织、规则和程序以及资源的信息；其区域的政治、经济、人口和地理特征；以及其个别地方政府成员(总共14,500人)的可比特征。这项分析是在大湖区区域治理试点研究的基础上进行的，目的是用这一国家样本的数据对我们的假设进行统计检验。第三，该项目将包括在各种学术和应用场所传播研究成果，包括撰写、分发和向包括州、地方和地区政策制定者、利益集团、改革者和其他政策专业人员在内的非学术受众发布研究报告。通过建立和整合理论，构建独特的数据库，采用适当的统计分析，并广泛传播结果，该项目将提供关于区域治理的结构、运作和后果的知识。学术价值：这项研究将为学者提供理解区域治理的理论和经验基础，目前关于区域治理的跨学科工作很少。这些问题具有理论意义，因为它们涉及体制安排如何与个人和总体偏好相结合，以影响政策成果和治理质量。该办法提供了一个综合了政治和经济考虑的理论框架，适用于广泛的区域治理努力。这项工作也与许多其他应用有关，在这些应用中，个别政府参与自愿集体行动，如国家间合作、县与地方关系、国际联盟和国际经济协定。更广泛的影响：拟议的研究具有直接的实用价值，因为全国各地的社区正在努力就各种问题建立有效的合作安排。这项研究将为政策制定者提供设计更有效的区域机构的工具，并为公众提供评估区域治理努力的指导方针。

Abstract: Balancing Competing Interests in American Regional GovernanceThis project will study regional governance in the United States. Many public policy decisions taken at the local level have implications for actors in other political jurisdictions, leading to calls for greater regional coordination. However, all regional governance efforts face a fundamental tension: local governments must give up some authority to achieve regional benefits. Local actors may then be held accountable by their constituents for regional outcomes. Regionalism thus compels local governments to ask: what are the expected local benefits of regional policymaking, and how do those benefits compare to the expected local political costs of delegating power to the region? In other words, regionalism may be advocated to solve problems that are essentially economic - externalities and economies of scale - but its outputs are expected to also reflect its members' political and economic interests and the rules by which those interests are aggregated.This project will examine the actions of regional governance efforts and assess how these efforts strike a balance between regional and local interests. The proposed study has three main components. First, it draws upon theories of externalities, collective action, and decision-making to generate hypotheses about how regional governance efforts balance local and regional interests. Second, it involves the construction and analysis of an extensive database of all 516 currently operating regional councils in the United States. Regional councils are one class of regional governance efforts that exist in 48 states and that represent an important form of regional governance. The database will include information about each regional council's activities, policy priorities, budgets, legislative mandates, history, organization, rules and procedures, and resources; the political, economic, demographic, and geographic characteristics of its region; and comparable characteristics of its individual local government members (14,500 in all). The analysis builds upon a pilot study of regional governance in the Great Lakes area to conduct statistical tests of our hypotheses with data from this national sample. Third, the project will include dissemination of the research results in a variety of academic and applied venues, including writing, distributing, and presenting research reports to non-academic audiences including state, local, and regional policy-makers, interest groups, reformers, and other policy professionals. By building and integrating theory, constructing a unique database, employing appropriate statistical analyses, and widely disseminating the results, the project will provide knowledge about the structure, operation, and consequences of regional governance. Intellectual Merit: This study will provide scholars with theoretical and empirical bases for understanding regional governance, about which little such interdisciplinary work currently exists. The questions are of theoretical significance as they address how institutional arrangements combine with individual and aggregate preferences to affect policy outcomes and the quality of governance. The approach provides a theoretical framework that integrates political and economic considerations, and that is applicable to a wide range of regional governance efforts. The work is also relevant to numerous other applications where individual governments engage in voluntary collective action such as inter-state collaboratives, county-local relationships, international alliances, and international economic agreements. Broader Impact: The proposed research is of immediate practical value as communities around the country struggle to construct effective cooperative arrangements across a variety of issues. The research will supply policymakers with tools for designing more effective regional institutions and will provide the public with guidelines for evaluating regional governance efforts.