Balancing Competing Interests in American Regional Governance

平衡美国区域治理中的利益竞争

• 批准号: 0452281
• 负责人: Elisabeth Gerber
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-03-01 至 2009-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0452281&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Balancing; Competing; Interests; American; Regional

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.

翻译后摘要：在美国的区域治理平衡竞争利益这个项目将研究在美国的区域治理。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体产生影响，导致要求加强区域协调。然而，所有的区域治理努力都面临着一个根本性的紧张关系：地方政府必须放弃一些权力，以实现区域利益。地方行为体的选民可要求其对区域成果负责。因此，地方主义迫使地方政府提出这样的问题：地方政策制定的预期地方利益是什么？这些利益与将权力下放给该地区的预期地方政治成本相比如何？ 也就是说，区域主义可以用来解决外部性和规模经济等经济问题，但其结果也应该反映成员国的政治和经济利益，以及这些利益的集合规则。本项目将研究区域治理的行动，并评估这些努力如何在区域和地方利益之间取得平衡。拟议的研究有三个主要组成部分。首先，它借鉴了外部性，集体行动和决策的理论，以产生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，其中包括美国目前所有516个正在运作的区域理事会。区域理事会是存在于48个州的一类区域治理努力，代表了区域治理的一种重要形式。该数据库将包括关于每个区域理事会的活动、政策优先事项、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（共14 500人）的可比特征。该分析建立在对五大湖地区区域治理的试点研究的基础上，利用来自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，分发和向非学术受众，包括州，地方和区域政策制定者，利益集团，改革者和其他政策专业人士介绍研究报告。通过建立和整合理论，建立一个独特的数据库，采用适当的统计分析，并广泛传播的结果，该项目将提供有关的结构，操作和区域治理的后果的知识。智力优势：本研究将为学者理解区域治理提供理论和经验基础，目前这种跨学科的研究很少。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结合联合收割机，以影响政策结果和治理质量。该方法提供了一个理论框架，综合了政治和经济考虑，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，其中个别政府参与自愿集体行动，如国家间合作，县-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都在努力就各种问题建立有效的合作安排。这项研究将为决策者提供设计更有效的区域机构的工具，并为公众提供评价区域治理工作的准则。