TY - JOUR
AU - Feiock, Richard, C
AB - Abstract Local governmental efforts to achieve greater sustainability have come to play a prominent role within urbanized regions. Despite the prominence of collaboration and collective action in the inter-governmental literature, we know little about how the collaborative mechanisms used to address them are influenced by the configurations of horizontal, general-purpose governments and vertical, single-purpose governments. We combine national- and metropolitan-level analyses through a mixed-methods design to fill this lacuna. The first component examines how fragmentation influences choices of mechanisms for interlocal collaboration utilizing surveys of U.S. cities. The second component examines collaboration barriers between localities in a single metropolitan area through qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with twenty city managers in the Chicago metropolitan region, one of the most fragmented in the United States. These analyses offer evidence to support the conclusion that more fragmented regions may be better suited to overcome coordination risks and find more avenues for collaborative activities. However, preference heterogeneity within fragmented environments increases the risk of defection and thus offsets some advantages of polycentricity. Metropolitan regions have been characterized as a hodgepodge of cities, special districts, townships, counties, and regional authorities (Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013; Hendrick and Shi 2015), in which citizens are often partitioned along racial/ethnic, income, and ideological lines (Deslatte, Feiock, and Wassel 2017). Political science and policy scholars have recognized that local governments in this environment are often mismatched with the scale of collective-action for problems such as urban sprawl, infrastructure, congestion, and pollution (Feiock 2013; Terman and Feiock 2014; Zeemering 2016). Despite the attention collaboration has garnered in the inter-governmental literature (Feiock and Scholz 2010), we know little about how governmental fragmentation and population sorting influence public decision-makers’ perceptions of collective-action problems and the risks associated with collaborative mechanisms to mitigate them. Fragmentation of authority among multiple and overlapping governments has been long touted as offering the potential to more efficiently reveal citizen preferences for public services (Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961; Tiebout 1956). But fragmentation also creates institutional collective action (ICA) problems when the effects of governmental actions such as building roads, shopping centers, or factories spill over into neighboring jurisdictions (Feiock 2013). Over the last decade, a stream of ICA literature has advanced our understanding of why local government actors choose between collaborative mechanisms to coordinate their actions in environmental protection, emergency management, and economic development (Feiock 2008, 2013; Feiock and Scholz 2010). Nevertheless, this research is limited by two significant shortcomings. First, it does not directly account for variation in the extent of governance fragmentation, defined as the partitioning of authority between different political jurisdictions. Second, it does not directly examine the role that the distribution of preferences within and across jurisdictions influences assessments of risk associated with of collaboration. Despite theoretical lip service to these issues, they are not adequately addressed in empirical applications of ICA. Collaboration risks are defined as difficulties in coordinating actions, agreeing to a division of costs, and the potential for parties to defect, renege on agreements or free ride (Feiock 2013). They are also, by definition, risks assessed via imperfect information. Collaboration always entails some uncertainty because of the real possibilities for coordination to fail, the fair division of benefits to be difficult to achieve, and cooperation to be subject to defections. But government actors also operate in environments of overlapping problems, limited time and attention which may limit their ability to identify new ideas and opportunities (Lubell, Henry, and McCoy 2010). To address these gaps, this study employs a mixed-methods design to examine local government collaboration risk. The first analysis component utilizes the Integrated City Sustainability Database (ICSD), which draws information from seven national surveys on collaboration activities of all U.S. cities over 50,000 population, to examine how governance fragmentation, problems, and heterogeneous actor preferences influence the willingness of local governments to use a range of integrative mechanisms. The second component draws a purposive sample of respondent cities and potential collaborative partners in a highly fragmented environment, the Chicago metropolitan region, to examine the collective-action problems cities prioritize. Our analyses converge on findings that governmental fragmentation increases the number of potential collaborative partners, but the sorting of populations into homogenous localities limits the range of collective-action problems local government actors are willing to address. Collaboration Risk and Problematic Preferences The benefits from resolving many types of problems (environmental, economic, social) are public goods, i.e., they are non-excludable and shared by all, but the costs of their resolution are borne by discrete actors (Olson 2012; Ostrom 1990). Although public goods pose collective-action challenges at all levels of government, they are particularly troublesome for local governments because their jurisdictional reach is smaller, meaning spillovers and incentives to free-ride are typically larger (Feiock 2013). Urban sustainability has emerged in recent years as a central collective-action dilemma given the salience of environmental issues, economic austerity and social equity concerns at metropolitan scales. Many urban scholars did not foresee the rapid ascendance of sustainability on local government agendas, and wrote it off as merely symbolic action. While signing climate agreements and joining associations may have symbolic elements, many cities, individually and in collaboration with neighboring jurisdictions, have taken bold steps beyond these actions to address fundamental problems of urban sustainability. Over the past decade, research has identified localized co-benefits from sustainability actions that offer selective benefits which minimize the “irrationality” of their pursuit (Kousky and Schneider 2003; Krause 2013; Spencer et al. 2017). Yet, the theoretical motivations for cities to collaborate to achieve such benefits, and empirical evidence of such, remain underdeveloped. The ICA framework presumes that local governments choose to collaborate when the utility of doing so outweighs the benefits of inaction or going it alone (Feiock and Scholz 2010). When the benefits of joint action are sufficient, governments choose among a variety of available collaboration mechanisms (Feiock 2013). For example, informal networks or service contracts might be preferred when preserving local autonomy is a paramount concern, while multilateral constructed networks, councils of governments and centralized authorities require delegating more decision-making (Feiock 2013). Common applications of these mechanisms in sustainability are detailed in table 1 along with their mean adoption rates among the respondent cities in the ICSD. Table 1 Collaborative mechanisms for addressing sustainability ICA dilemmas Informal agreement with one or more local governments (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) Informal networks provide the most autonomy and can be important for fostering norms of reciprocity. Informal mechanisms tend to emerge unplanned from interactions among local actors. Joint purchasing with other governments (Mean adoption rate = 30.2%) Contracts link individual units via joint ventures and service contracts which preserve autonomy and provide formal mechanisms for achieving economies of scale. The Environmentally Preferable Products Program (EPP) of Massachusetts is one example. Collaborative partnership with other local entities (Mean adoption rate = 43.9%) Partnerships and multilateral agreements for economic development and environmental protection are entered into voluntarily and require members to accept common terms of agreement and obligations. The DuPage River Salt Creek Work Group in Illinois is an example. Formal energy agreement between local governments (Mean adoption rate = 26.9%) These may encompass constructed networks in which higher-level authorities provide incentives for local government units to participate in collaborative provision of energy services. Collaboration for inventory of GHG emissions (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) These represent formal commitments to collaborative efforts usually organized by higher-level governments to guide local units in the development and implementation of climate action programs. New York’s Climate Smart Communities Program is an example. Amend comprehensive plan based on regional planning (Mean adoption rate = 30.7%) These represent actions to comply with multilateral agreements forged through regional authorities with sufficient functional and geographic scope to internalize externalities. Florida’s Local Government Comprehensive Planning and Land Development Act of 1985 represents an example where some local actions were mandated and others were optional. Informal agreement with one or more local governments (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) Informal networks provide the most autonomy and can be important for fostering norms of reciprocity. Informal mechanisms tend to emerge unplanned from interactions among local actors. Joint purchasing with other governments (Mean adoption rate = 30.2%) Contracts link individual units via joint ventures and service contracts which preserve autonomy and provide formal mechanisms for achieving economies of scale. The Environmentally Preferable Products Program (EPP) of Massachusetts is one example. Collaborative partnership with other local entities (Mean adoption rate = 43.9%) Partnerships and multilateral agreements for economic development and environmental protection are entered into voluntarily and require members to accept common terms of agreement and obligations. The DuPage River Salt Creek Work Group in Illinois is an example. Formal energy agreement between local governments (Mean adoption rate = 26.9%) These may encompass constructed networks in which higher-level authorities provide incentives for local government units to participate in collaborative provision of energy services. Collaboration for inventory of GHG emissions (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) These represent formal commitments to collaborative efforts usually organized by higher-level governments to guide local units in the development and implementation of climate action programs. New York’s Climate Smart Communities Program is an example. Amend comprehensive plan based on regional planning (Mean adoption rate = 30.7%) These represent actions to comply with multilateral agreements forged through regional authorities with sufficient functional and geographic scope to internalize externalities. Florida’s Local Government Comprehensive Planning and Land Development Act of 1985 represents an example where some local actions were mandated and others were optional. Sources: ICSD; Feiock 2013; Chicago-area interviews; New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Green Procurement Guide: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/opsc/docs/green_purchasing_guide_local_governments.pdf; New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Climate Smart Communities: https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administration_pdf/govopghgcsc.pdf; Florida State Statutes, Ch. 163.3177. Table 1 Collaborative mechanisms for addressing sustainability ICA dilemmas Informal agreement with one or more local governments (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) Informal networks provide the most autonomy and can be important for fostering norms of reciprocity. Informal mechanisms tend to emerge unplanned from interactions among local actors. Joint purchasing with other governments (Mean adoption rate = 30.2%) Contracts link individual units via joint ventures and service contracts which preserve autonomy and provide formal mechanisms for achieving economies of scale. The Environmentally Preferable Products Program (EPP) of Massachusetts is one example. Collaborative partnership with other local entities (Mean adoption rate = 43.9%) Partnerships and multilateral agreements for economic development and environmental protection are entered into voluntarily and require members to accept common terms of agreement and obligations. The DuPage River Salt Creek Work Group in Illinois is an example. Formal energy agreement between local governments (Mean adoption rate = 26.9%) These may encompass constructed networks in which higher-level authorities provide incentives for local government units to participate in collaborative provision of energy services. Collaboration for inventory of GHG emissions (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) These represent formal commitments to collaborative efforts usually organized by higher-level governments to guide local units in the development and implementation of climate action programs. New York’s Climate Smart Communities Program is an example. Amend comprehensive plan based on regional planning (Mean adoption rate = 30.7%) These represent actions to comply with multilateral agreements forged through regional authorities with sufficient functional and geographic scope to internalize externalities. Florida’s Local Government Comprehensive Planning and Land Development Act of 1985 represents an example where some local actions were mandated and others were optional. Informal agreement with one or more local governments (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) Informal networks provide the most autonomy and can be important for fostering norms of reciprocity. Informal mechanisms tend to emerge unplanned from interactions among local actors. Joint purchasing with other governments (Mean adoption rate = 30.2%) Contracts link individual units via joint ventures and service contracts which preserve autonomy and provide formal mechanisms for achieving economies of scale. The Environmentally Preferable Products Program (EPP) of Massachusetts is one example. Collaborative partnership with other local entities (Mean adoption rate = 43.9%) Partnerships and multilateral agreements for economic development and environmental protection are entered into voluntarily and require members to accept common terms of agreement and obligations. The DuPage River Salt Creek Work Group in Illinois is an example. Formal energy agreement between local governments (Mean adoption rate = 26.9%) These may encompass constructed networks in which higher-level authorities provide incentives for local government units to participate in collaborative provision of energy services. Collaboration for inventory of GHG emissions (Mean adoption rate = 35.3%) These represent formal commitments to collaborative efforts usually organized by higher-level governments to guide local units in the development and implementation of climate action programs. New York’s Climate Smart Communities Program is an example. Amend comprehensive plan based on regional planning (Mean adoption rate = 30.7%) These represent actions to comply with multilateral agreements forged through regional authorities with sufficient functional and geographic scope to internalize externalities. Florida’s Local Government Comprehensive Planning and Land Development Act of 1985 represents an example where some local actions were mandated and others were optional. Sources: ICSD; Feiock 2013; Chicago-area interviews; New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Green Procurement Guide: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/opsc/docs/green_purchasing_guide_local_governments.pdf; New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Climate Smart Communities: https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administration_pdf/govopghgcsc.pdf; Florida State Statutes, Ch. 163.3177. The choice of collaboration mechanisms poses risk, because collaboration can fail in several ways. Actors may lack of all relevant information necessary for coordination between governments. Participant governments may disagree on a fair division of costs, particularly when detrimental impacts of a problem are unequally borne by the parties. Actors may also have incentives to defect, or free-ride on others’ efforts rather than honoring their obligations (Feiock and Scholz 2010; Carr and Hawkins 2013). From this perspective, actors confront some unavoidable degree of uncertainty when they make collaboration decisions as they assess other actors’ intentions, commitment, and trustworthiness. The extent to which these risks are present, and hence the choices among integrative mechanisms are attributed to: (i) the existing political institutions, rules and collaborative institutions in place, which encompasses the degree of embeddedness and political fragmentation in a region; (ii) the nature of the underlying problem, i.e., whether they are problems of economies of scale or spillovers; and (iii) the actors involved, which shapes the distribution of preferences within and across communities (Feiock 2013). Collaboration risks are particularly problematic because normative prescriptions for collaboration often assume governments have prioritized problems and possess the expertise to recognize the optimal integrative mechanism. These assumptions are typically unmet in complex situations such as urban governance and environmental politics where problems are often ignored or unrealized, attention is fleeting and expertise lacking (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). When problems draw comparatively less political attention or require high levels of resources and time, we might expect to see more bounded, limited searches for integrative solutions. From an information-processing perspective, governmental fragmentation complicates not only the decision calculus by increasing the number of potential collaborators—and alternative solutions—but also the search costs for seeking them out. Related to fragmentation, metropolitan regions in the United States and other countries have populations which have been sorted over the last century into cleavages of heterogeneous preferences for government services. Thus far, the extant research on collaborative governance has not empirically or theoretically disentangled how information oversupply in fragmented regions and homophily distinctively shape the collaborative riskscape. Governmental Fragmentation and Search Governmental fragmentation is often described as a cause of collective-action dilemmas (Feiock and Scholz 2010). A greater number of general purpose local governments—horizontal fragmentation—reduces the spatial scale of service delivery by local jurisdictions and increases the potential for positive and negative externalities. Fragmentation can increase both the scope of the potential spillovers and the information costs linked to greater coordination and division risks. In metropolitan areas with higher fragmentation, governmental competition for resources is often higher (Deslatte and Stokan 2017). Cities are also more likely to be mismatched with the scale of the urban problems they confront. But fragmentation also might generate collaboration opportunities for local governments by virtue of increasing the number of potential partners with common interests. Thus, fragmentation not only increases the necessity to collaborate but also drives up search costs. Cities in highly fragmented regions might rely on informal networks and other information-sharing venues to seek out potential partners to overcome the costs of search. Division risks are greater when cities must equitably allocate costs and benefits for collaborations across a larger pool of jurisdictions, making search costs especially salient. Local governments may agree on general goals, such as reducing auto traffic through mutual investment in transit modes such as commuter rail, bicycle-share, or bus systems, but the costs and benefits from such investments may be divvied out in many ways—and each party has an incentive to seek the highest payout. Scale economies through joint purchasing of energy-efficient products such as LED street-lighting may impose greater information and bargaining costs when a larger number of partners must agree on common specifications for green technologies. And investment in asset-specific infrastructure such as water treatment or utility plants run the risk of one party disproportionately absorbing costs. Vertical fragmentation—the proliferation of single-purpose districts that overlap municipal governments—involves delegation of authority to specialized governmental districts or authorities which internalize spillovers or achieve scale economies. Vertical delegation of specific service responsibilities in one-way localities may mitigate risks from high asset-specificity situations—such as investment in utilities or water provision—in which both the buying and selling government agents may behave opportunistically. Greater reliance on special districts for service-delivery could also increase avenues for voluntary collaboration among general-purpose governments be subsetting the range of potential activities they can engage in. In other words, the risk landscape is has been altered when policy areas in which economies of scale and spillovers which are more difficult to address have been vertically integrated within independent authorities (Mullin 2009). We would expect this reduced collaborative policy space generally allows policymakers to focus limited attention on a fewer number of areas for interlocal collaboration. Thus, fragmentation may reduce collaboration risks when seeking bilateral partnerships in a wider field of potential suitors, but lead to higher information and bargaining costs when multilateral mechanisms are necessary. On the whole, we expect higher levels of fragmentation to not only increase the range of voluntary collaborative mechanisms in use—in part because fragmentation exacerbates environmental, economic and social spillovers which necessitate intergovernmental responses—but also by increasing the overall number of potential partners and subsetting the collaborative policy space for general-purpose jurisdictions. Hypothesis 1 (H1): Higher levels of horizontal and vertical fragmentation will be positively associated with the number of collaborative mechanisms a local government uses. ICA Problem Types Urban sustainability threats can be conceptualized as scale-economy, externality, and common-pool resource problems (Steinacker 2010). For a given problem, we assume that governments engage in some type of search process and evaluation to assess whether more or less costly mechanisms such as regional planning, formal bilateral agreements, or joint-purchasing are necessary to ameliorate the risk of failure. When problems have the attention of collective parties, the specific characteristics of ICA dilemmas precondition these evaluations. If collaboration risks are greater, more formal agreements or arrangements encompassing a larger set of actors or issues are needed to mitigate risk, even though these arrangements limit autonomy and increase the complexity of decision-making. Where risks are lower, more informal agreements may emerge and less complex agreements that are bilateral or involve a single policy are preferred (Feiock and Scholz 2010; Yi et al. 2017). The implication from this reasoning is that cities confronting multiple types of ICA problems will use multiple classes of integrative mechanisms, because some problems entail higher risks for collective parties than others. Scale-economy problems typically involve lost efficiencies and may be more easily resolved when local governments coordinate the production of a public good. This is more likely where there are more potential negotiating partners with whom government actors can explore expanding scales of production. Scale-economies in the production of local public goods and services often represent the clearest path to short-term financial gains. However, negotiating collaborative solutions requires time and resources. Scale-economy ICA dilemmas occur when cities face collaborative alternatives with lower fixed costs but increased measurement difficulty. Such alternatives include pooling purchasing power for items such as LED street light fixtures, green vehicle fleets and recycled products which lower financial costs. Dividing the benefit between parties is clearer in joint-purchasing. Cooperation in these situations may be informally structured which makes enforcement of agreements more costly. Even when coordination of similar service activities reduces redundancies, information asymmetries lead to inaction and lost opportunities for joint gains (Steinacker 2010). Joint-purchasing for sustainability can involve different technical specifications for cities. Coordinating informal agreements between bilateral partners can impose costs in the form of time and energy needed to ascertain the preferences and resources of the partners. The degree of difficulty increases substantially with multilateral agreements or agreements that formalize sharing of authority. Externalities result when the effects of governmental services spill over into nearby jurisdictions. For instance, cities may choose to share information on regional economic development initiatives to avoid competition which wastes resources and produces transportation or pollution spillovers. But not every potential party to this information-sharing will be made better off by it. Cities which are frequently winners in the competition for firm relocations and attracting affluent residents can afford to avoid or renege on collaborative arrangements. Thus, division and agency costs are higher when the nature of the ICA dilemma results from spillovers. Problems of this type are not easily solved without the coercive power of a higher governmental authority, since the preferences of the externality producer and the affected parties are different (Jones 2010). Finally, common-pool resource dilemmas present more complicated pictures because the parties are better off in the long-term by collaborating, but have short-term incentives to go it alone and continue over-consuming the resources. Common-pool ICA situations such as land- and water-use pose both initial cooperation problems, where there are incentive for short-term gains by over-consumption, and sustained cooperation problems in enforcing agreements to limit use. The mere potential of opportunism, when confronted with common-pool situations likely dissuades collaborative approaches given the high risk that partnerships will be abandoned in the future. Sustainability represents a spectrum of problems which can include diseconomies of scale in environmental technologies, spillovers in air and water pollution or traffic congestion, and common-pool resource threats such as water mismanagement and habitat loss. Embeddedness, or repeated interactions between parties—such as when communities have prior relationships with each other through previous collaborations—may minimize risks associated with each of these problems by building trust and norms of reciprocity. The presence of region-wide collaborative initiatives such as Chicago’s “Greenest Region” Compact or the Northern Arizona Sustainable Economic Development Initiative which tackle energy, housing, development, and climate change issues are examples of voluntary efforts to overcome such defection risks by establishing norms of trust between governmental actors. However, because the nature of the ICA dilemma pre-conditions the evaluation of collaborative solutions, we expect that government actors focused on narrower conceptualizations of the benefits from sustainability will be less likely to prioritize other, cross-cutting policy efforts aimed at spillovers and common-pool dilemmas. Specifically, local governments focused on pursuing sustainability initiatives with greater potential for short-term financial benefits will focus on gaining economies of scale and be less likely to engage in a broader array of integrative mechanisms. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Local governments’ interest in short-term financial benefits will be negatively associated with the number of collaborative mechanisms a local government uses. Preference Homophily and Routinized Interactions The third component of institutional collective-action problems concerns the distribution of policy preferences among citizens within and across jurisdictions (Feiock 2008). Cities which have different populations and service needs face greater potential technical, fiscal, and political barriers to collaborating. Similarity in population characteristics across jurisdictions decreases the potential for conflict and can render collaboration more advantageous. This is often conceptualized as homophily, or the similarities in key population traits which may influence political actors’ assessments of collaboration risk (Feiock 2013; Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013; Ulibarri and Scott 2016). Homophily manifests in multiple, intersecting ways. Socio-economic differences across jurisdictions create resource disparities and can prompt localities to pursue divergent economic development goals for either short-term growth or jobs versus long-term quality of life and economic opportunities (Deslatte and Stokan 2017). For instance, income inequality across local governments has been shown to reduce the incentives for wealthier communities to enact some sustainability policies when social pressures from peers and the number of potential collaborative partners are lower (Deslatte, Feiock and Wassel 2017). Communities with differing demographic compositions—such as elderly communities, bedroom communities, or those with higher immigrant or ethnic minority populations—face unique demands for public services which increases the perception that collaborating for joint services is risky (Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013). Meanwhile, political homophily is when local governments share similar ideological and demographic characteristics. Political homophily is thought to increase interest in collaboration by minimizing the transaction costs of searching for partners, bargaining, and enforcing agreements (Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013; Scott 2016). The distribution of preferences is thought to influence interlocal collaborative activities through multiple pathways. One school of thought views preference homophily as one trait of would-be partners thought to help overcome defection risks (Feiock 2008; Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013). Service-need complexity within jurisdictions may hasten the need for collaborative approaches. Demographic homogeneity between the constituencies of bargaining agents for neighboring jurisdictions may communicate similar political and economic preferences. Demographically similar, neighboring communities may share cultural viewpoints which minimize risks of cooperation (Visser 2002). Such communities also are more likely to share similar service needs. Evidence also suggests that politically similar communities in which both populations contained more liberal or Democratic-registered voters are more likely to collaborate on regional land-use issues such as increasing affordable housing and urban density (Gerber, Henry, and Lubell 2013). These cities may not only face common service-demands, but also share similar ideological beliefs for the role of government in responding to environmental, economic, or social problems. We expect that when city characteristics are similar to that of their neighbors, they will engage in a wider range of collaborative mechanisms due to the lower risks of coordinating and enforcing agreements. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Higher levels of political and demographic similarity across localities will be positively associated with the overall number of collaborative mechanisms a local government uses. A second school of thought argues that a proclivity to work with homogenous neighboring jurisdictions may produce an overall disincentive for seeking out a wider array of collaborative arrangements that reduces collaboration opportunities. This contention has been empirically explored via the ecology of games framework (EGF), which holds that participation in existing collaborative institutions may have a negative impact on the willingness to cooperate on similar policy goals via alternative avenues (Lubell 2013; Lubell, Henry, and McCoy 2010). The gist of this argument is that when ICA problems involve similar sets of actors, multiple institutions for structuring interactions on these problems, and overlapping territorial scales, actors may lack the capacity to fully engage in multiple venues (Scott 2016). Thus, collaboration in one venue diminishes the motivation, psychological needs, or organizational resources of actors to cooperate elsewhere. Although the EGF has been described as a contrast with ICA theory under traditional rational choice assumptions of decision making, we argue these approaches can be congruent when considering multiple types of collective-action problems which necessitate the alternative venues. For instance, cities negotiating the joint purchasing of energy-efficient technologies to save money typically do so through informal networks and authorize them via individual council actions, while those negotiating transit projects which may relieve traffic snarls involve regional planning authorities and state and federal actors. In both examples, the problem type necessitates not only the mechanism but the venue or venues with policy jurisdiction. Moreover, the ICA approach has explored how collaboration mechanisms can either compliment or crowd each other out (Kwon et al. 2014). The EGF approach has proffered several reasons why the quality and frequency of collaborations may be negatively impacted by overlapping coordinating venues, including the increased transaction costs and fiscal and cognitive constraints facing public organizations (Lubell, Henry, and McCoy 2010; Lubell et al. 2017; Scott 2016). Broad participation within policy forums imposes opportunity costs on government actors who must decide judiciously where to expend limited budgets and energy to influence collective decisions (Mewhirter, Coleman, and Berardo 2017). Because local governments may have an incentive to work with partners with whom they share similar population characteristics and service-demands, actors may also be unaware of other opportunities for gains from cooperation. These “payoff externalities” occur because localities may fail to identify alternative opportunities or lack an understanding of how their existing collaborative behaviors impact opportunities in other venues (Baumgartner and Jones 2015; Lubell, Henry, and McCoy 2010). Either way, localities with routinized patterns of interaction are unable or unwilling to engage in additional information-gathering and considerations, foregoing negotiating more complex, multilateral collaborative service arrangements with a broader population of local governments. Thus, this insularity should lead to cycles of mutual reciprocity between homogenous governments which reduces the incentives to search for new alternatives and limits the range of collaborative mechanisms employed. To consider such tradeoffs within the ICA framework, following Kwon et al. (2014) we need to empirically examine an array of integrative mechanisms together rather than a single mechanism in isolation. Local governments do not make equal commitments of time and resources to developing unique strategies for each problem they face (Mewhirter, Coleman, and Berardo 2017). If the solution to one ICA problem increases the difficulty for also solving others, we would expect local officials to prioritize and limit their collaborative activities to venues or partnerships with lower collaboration risks. Cities may fail to detect additional alternatives due to their own cognitive and resource limits. They may also be more attentive to solving routine problems in which measuring success is easier. Since cities with more demographically homogeneous populations are more likely to routinize collaborative relationships and stick with trusted partners, we expect that such “payoff externalities” will be more likely to materialize when these governments fail to use a broader range of integrative mechanisms. Hypothesis 4 (H4): Higher levels of demographic homogeneity within localities will be negatively associated with the overall number of collaborative mechanisms a local government uses. In summary, the ICA framework posits that localities will turn to more authoritative and complex regional governance approaches to mitigate collaboration risk. This expectation is relatively unexplored within the context of varying levels of fragmented authority and overlapping problem venues. In such environments, we expect to see benefits from sorting through information-abundant environments offset to some extent by truncated searches and prioritization of some ICA problems over others. Empirically examining this expectation requires a multi-method research strategy. Data and Methods The sequential, explanatory mixed method study examines collaboration risk, first through surveys of national samples of cities, and second through qualitative interviews conducted with respondent cities in a single region allowing us to further unpack the findings of preference homophily and explore alternative explanations for why cities fail to capitalize on some collaborative opportunities (Creswell and Clark 2011). Quantitative Analysis The quantitative analysis uses the Integrated City Sustainability Database (ICSD), which combines responses from seven nationwide surveys on sustainability, all of which were independently administered to U.S. cities over an 18-month period between 2010 and 2011 (Feiock et al. 2014). Response rates for the seven individual surveys range from 25 to 77 percent. Over 2,500 cities responded to at least one of the surveys, collectively covering more than 90 percent of cities with populations larger than 50,000. The ICSD uses multiple imputation to address missingness and results in the most comprehensive database on local sustainability policy in the United States. See Feiock et al. (2014) for a comprehensive description of the component surveys’ content and administration, and Curley et al. (2017) for a detailed description of the data imputation approach. Outcome Measure To explore factors which may influence a broader or more confined range of collaborative mechanisms, our quantitative outcome measure is an additive collaboration index capturing the range of mechanisms types included in the ICSD and detailed in table 1. The dataset includes six survey items capturing collaborative actions related to sustainability: joint purchasing with other governments; working with other agencies or local governments in activities such as an inventory of GHG emissions; joining a collaborative partnership with other local entities; entering into an informal agreement with one or more local governments; entering into a formal agreement with one or more local governments on energy issues; and enacting changes to comprehensive plan or other local plans based on regional planning effort. This outcome measure captures a range of mechanisms which are theoretically utilized to resolve different types of ICA problems. We then employ a mixed-effects Poisson estimation approach to model the count of collaborative activities cities used during the survey period. Observations were grouped by state and a random intercept was estimated for forty-nine states in the dataset, allowing the model to control for the clustering effect on cities situated in the same state.1 The likelihood-ratio test of alpha = 0 indicates the panel estimator is significantly different from the pooled Poisson estimator. Explanatory Measures We utilize three categories of explanatory variables to measure the influence of divergent problem types, governmental fragmentation, and homophily. To capture divergent problem types, we create a measure from the ICSD for short-term savings from a survey item asking cities for factors influencing their sustainability activities, with the expectation a higher priority placed on short-term financial benefits by a locality reflects a narrower focus on ICA problems involving economies of scale. To measure fragmentation, we follow the lead of Hendrick and Shi (2015) and utilize data on the number of general-purpose and special-purpose governments in each Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) from the 2012 U.S. Census of Governments to create measures of horizontal fragmentation and vertical fragmentation. Horizontal fragmentation is measured as the population of the metropolitan area divided by the number of general purpose governments in the MSA, which is then divided by 100,000. We then subtracted this per capita value from 1, so that an increase in the horizontal fragmentation measure represents an increase in general-purpose governmental fragmentation. Vertical fragmentation is measured as the ratio of special districts to all local governments in an MSA. Because the relationships between fragmentation and collaboration may be nonlinear, we included quadratic terms for both fragmentation measures by multiplying the variables by themselves. To measure homophily, we first use a series of demographic and economic characteristics for each city from the 2010 U.S. Census. We draw measures of median household income, education (percentage of the population with a four-year college degree), and population, population density and population change from the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census. We created measures for population age diversity and ethnic diversity by squaring the proportions of each age and racial/ethnic group, and dividing the sum of the squares by 10,000, producing two measures for age and ethnic diversity equivalent to a Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI), which is used in economics to capture firm concentration in a marketplace. In the context of diversity, the closer the index gets to 1, the less diversity is measured in the city, in terms of age and racial/ethnic diversity. We then use three measures of community characteristics—income difference, ethnic difference, and ideology difference—capturing the deviance from the state-level means on measures of household income, racial/ethnic composition, and liberal ideology (measured as county vote share for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 election). It is likely that the county-level measure of liberal voting tendency captures heterogeneity between clustered sets of neighboring governments and the state overall. Because it takes two to collaborate, we argue the county-level measure represents a regrettably coarse, but necessary, measure of homogeneity between the city respondent and its nearest neighbors. Therefore, we expect that county-level ideological difference from the state will display a positive association with the range of collaborative mechanisms a nested city used. We also include several measures to account for the broader framework of existing rules and integrative mechanisms. Public choice scholars have long argued that autonomous, polycentric systems offer better solutions to resource-management problems through individual actors’ heightened trust, disaggregated knowledge, adapted rules and trustworthy partners (Ostrom 1990; Tiebout 1956; Ostrom, Warren and Teibout 1961). In the United States, hierarchical institutional arrangements vary dramatically across states. To measure institutional arrangements, we generate a measure of state involvement by combining two dichotomous survey items asking whether state procedural requirements such as review of local policies or programs, or state-level sustainability initiatives influence local sustainability initiative adoption. We also include a dichotomous measure of whether cities have a separate sustainability office. Local institutional structure also influences the commitment to cooperation. Cities organized under council-manager form of government, for instance, may approach sustainability policies with a greater long-term orientation, due to city managers’ professional and career norms (Deslatte, Swann, and Feiock 2017). Cities led by strong mayors tend to favor policies which provide shorter-term credit claiming opportunities for elected officials (Clingermayer and Feiock 2001). We include dichotomous measures for whether the local government executive agencies are led by city managers or mayors. All variables were standardized and population measures were logged. Descriptive statistics are reported in table 2. Table 2 Descriptive statistics for non-imputed data Mean SD Min. Max| Collaboration Index (DV) 1.266 1.46 0 6 Short-term savings 2.66 1.02 0 4 Median income ($) 65,465 20,459 30,470 161,670 Education 30.45 13.75 4.7 79.3 Horizontal fragmentation 0.567 0.407 0.000 0.992 Vertical fragmentation 0.657 0.168 0.174 0.956 Age homogeneity 0.369 0.027 0.298 0.486 Ethnic homogeneity 0.508 0.143 0.262 0.900 Income difference ($) −2,471 21,372 −69,878 86,787 Ethnic difference 3.76e-9 14.76 −62.38 37.44 Ideology difference −1.173 13.11 −64.89 33.18 Mayor-council 0.328 0.47 0 1 Council-manager 0.615 0.486 0 1 State-involvement 0.453 0.678 0 2 Sustainability office 0.355 0.479 0 1 Population 162,616 395,616 50,073 8,175,133 Population density 3,920 3,562 171.2 51,810 Population change 16.27 29.15 −29.1 281 Mean SD Min. Max| Collaboration Index (DV) 1.266 1.46 0 6 Short-term savings 2.66 1.02 0 4 Median income ($) 65,465 20,459 30,470 161,670 Education 30.45 13.75 4.7 79.3 Horizontal fragmentation 0.567 0.407 0.000 0.992 Vertical fragmentation 0.657 0.168 0.174 0.956 Age homogeneity 0.369 0.027 0.298 0.486 Ethnic homogeneity 0.508 0.143 0.262 0.900 Income difference ($) −2,471 21,372 −69,878 86,787 Ethnic difference 3.76e-9 14.76 −62.38 37.44 Ideology difference −1.173 13.11 −64.89 33.18 Mayor-council 0.328 0.47 0 1 Council-manager 0.615 0.486 0 1 State-involvement 0.453 0.678 0 2 Sustainability office 0.355 0.479 0 1 Population 162,616 395,616 50,073 8,175,133 Population density 3,920 3,562 171.2 51,810 Population change 16.27 29.15 −29.1 281 Sources: ICSD, 2000, 2010 U.S. Census, 2012 Census of Governments. Table 2 Descriptive statistics for non-imputed data Mean SD Min. Max| Collaboration Index (DV) 1.266 1.46 0 6 Short-term savings 2.66 1.02 0 4 Median income ($) 65,465 20,459 30,470 161,670 Education 30.45 13.75 4.7 79.3 Horizontal fragmentation 0.567 0.407 0.000 0.992 Vertical fragmentation 0.657 0.168 0.174 0.956 Age homogeneity 0.369 0.027 0.298 0.486 Ethnic homogeneity 0.508 0.143 0.262 0.900 Income difference ($) −2,471 21,372 −69,878 86,787 Ethnic difference 3.76e-9 14.76 −62.38 37.44 Ideology difference −1.173 13.11 −64.89 33.18 Mayor-council 0.328 0.47 0 1 Council-manager 0.615 0.486 0 1 State-involvement 0.453 0.678 0 2 Sustainability office 0.355 0.479 0 1 Population 162,616 395,616 50,073 8,175,133 Population density 3,920 3,562 171.2 51,810 Population change 16.27 29.15 −29.1 281 Mean SD Min. Max| Collaboration Index (DV) 1.266 1.46 0 6 Short-term savings 2.66 1.02 0 4 Median income ($) 65,465 20,459 30,470 161,670 Education 30.45 13.75 4.7 79.3 Horizontal fragmentation 0.567 0.407 0.000 0.992 Vertical fragmentation 0.657 0.168 0.174 0.956 Age homogeneity 0.369 0.027 0.298 0.486 Ethnic homogeneity 0.508 0.143 0.262 0.900 Income difference ($) −2,471 21,372 −69,878 86,787 Ethnic difference 3.76e-9 14.76 −62.38 37.44 Ideology difference −1.173 13.11 −64.89 33.18 Mayor-council 0.328 0.47 0 1 Council-manager 0.615 0.486 0 1 State-involvement 0.453 0.678 0 2 Sustainability office 0.355 0.479 0 1 Population 162,616 395,616 50,073 8,175,133 Population density 3,920 3,562 171.2 51,810 Population change 16.27 29.15 −29.1 281 Sources: ICSD, 2000, 2010 U.S. Census, 2012 Census of Governments. Qualitative Analysis The second source of data was obtained from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with city managers in twenty municipalities located in the Chicago, Illinois metropolitan area, eleven of which responded to at least one of the surveys and are contained in the ICSD. Chicago is a heavily fragmented metropolitan region which makes it an excellent testbed for collaborative research, with more than 1,200 units of local government – municipalities, counties, townships, school districts and single-purpose or special districts. We selected a single MSA for both convenience and to explore the role that preference heterogeneity plays in ICA problem selection, essentially controlling for the effect of high fragmentation. A purposive, snowball sampling procedure was utilized beginning with Illinois local governments included in the ICSD. Additional cities were identified by interviewees as potential collaborators in order to balance identified collaboration partners with localities representative of the suburban area’s racial/ethnic, income, and political profile (mean population = 43,839). With a mixed methods approach, challenges to validity can arise from data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Nevertheless, there are advantages to using the Chicago metropolitan area for explanatory context. Like the nation, the Chicago area is highly suburbanized with a large number of local units of government (Hendrick and Shi 2015). Our purposively sampled pool of municipalities was intended to provide transferability, representing a fiscally disbursed and economically competitive environment analogous to the population of U.S. cities sampled in the EECBG survey (Teddlie and Yu 2007). The interviews were conducted in-person with city managers and administrators during the period of April to November 2016. Each interview was approximately sixty minutes in length. Interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim before being coded by two researchers. The interview protocol asked managers to define sustainability within their own organizations, and how barriers and drivers influence their governments’ progress toward sustainability. Additionally, they were asked what other local governments they work with which have demonstrated innovativeness, and what factors influence this perception. A descriptive coding approach was utilized to identify passages of qualitative data pertaining to sustainability (Miles and Huberman 1994; Saldaña 2015). A second-cycle, pattern coding process was then used to “identify an emergent theme, configuration or explanation” from the interviews associated with collaborative risk relative to sustainability (Miles and Huberman 1994, 69). In this pattern coding, data were organized into fifteen themes related to sustainability community preferences, the four most common being organizational culture, community environmental stewardship, long-term financial solvency, and short-term financial efficiency. We use these themes to help better understand how institutional and environmental conditions might influence collaboration risk relative to sustainability (Creswell and Clark 2011). Figure 1 displays the sequential process of quantitative and qualitative strands of the analysis. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide In a sequential, mixed-methods design, qualitative data analysis is intended to further elucidate the quantitative findings, rather than mixing both strands at an earlier phase of the analysis. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide In a sequential, mixed-methods design, qualitative data analysis is intended to further elucidate the quantitative findings, rather than mixing both strands at an earlier phase of the analysis. Findings The empirical evidence strongly supports our expectations that the level of fragmentation, the ICA problem types, and the distribution of preferences across the metropolitan landscape influence the range of integrative mechanisms used to enhance sustainability. While fragmentation is observed to lead cities to engage in a wider array of collaborative mechanisms, the qualitative evidence elucidates the ways in which divergent preferences within and across communities can dampen this effect and overcome the potential for joint gains. Table 3 reports results from three random-intercept Poisson regression models. Model 1 considers the influence of only the respondent cities’ motivation for pursuing sustainability activities for short-term financial savings, while Models 2 and 3 contain the fragmentation variables. The comprehensive model (Model 3) results indicate both the additive measure of horizontal fragmentation (⁠ α = 0.05) and the quadratic term (⁠ α = 0.1) are statistically significant, suggesting horizontal fragmentation has a positive, exponentially increasing influence on the number of collaborative mechanisms cities use, holding all other factors in the model constant. This conforms with the public choice expectation (H1) that while fragmented governmental authority may be a culprit for ICA dilemmas, greater numbers of local governments in a metropolitan region may reduce the search costs for potential collaborative partners. Polycentricity is premised on the benefits of diffuse governing arrangements through decoupling production and provision of public goods. Controlling for other sources of regional heterogeneity which may serve as barrier to collaboration, fragmented governance on its face may represent a more fertile laboratory for such voluntary arrangements to develop. Table 3 Imputed estimates of random-intercept poisson regression (MI = 20) Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Short-term savings −0.119*** (0.042) −0.118*** (0.043) −0.109** (0.042) Horizontal frag. 0.112* (0.068) 0.145** (0.069) H. frag. (squared) 0.018 (0.015) 0.024* (0.014) Vertical frag. 0.078* (0.047) 0.079* (0.048) V. frag. (squared) 0.031 (0.031) 0.037 (0.031) Age homogeneity −0.021 (0.041) Ethnic homogeneity −0.071* (0.042) Income difference −0.097* (0.057) Ethnic difference −0.0009 (0.044) Ideology difference 0.089** (0.036) Median income 0.019 (0.066) 0.041 (0.066) 0.145* (0.08) Education 0.017 (0.061) 0.01 (0.06) −0.004 (0.059) Mayor-council 0.122* (0.071) 0.123* (0.071) 0.128* (0.077) Council-manager 0.113 (0.072) 0.113 (0.073) 0.118 (0.079) State-involvement −0.024 (.046) −0.024 (0.047) −0.02 (0.047) Sustainability office 0.058 (0.041) 0.06 (0.04) 0.057 (0.041) Population 0.056** (0.027) 0.056** (0.026) 0.044 (0.027) Population density −0.044 (0.039) −0.027 (0.04) −0.031 (0.043) Population change 0.0006** (0.038) −0.007 (0.039) 0.01 (0.039) N 683 683 683 Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Short-term savings −0.119*** (0.042) −0.118*** (0.043) −0.109** (0.042) Horizontal frag. 0.112* (0.068) 0.145** (0.069) H. frag. (squared) 0.018 (0.015) 0.024* (0.014) Vertical frag. 0.078* (0.047) 0.079* (0.048) V. frag. (squared) 0.031 (0.031) 0.037 (0.031) Age homogeneity −0.021 (0.041) Ethnic homogeneity −0.071* (0.042) Income difference −0.097* (0.057) Ethnic difference −0.0009 (0.044) Ideology difference 0.089** (0.036) Median income 0.019 (0.066) 0.041 (0.066) 0.145* (0.08) Education 0.017 (0.061) 0.01 (0.06) −0.004 (0.059) Mayor-council 0.122* (0.071) 0.123* (0.071) 0.128* (0.077) Council-manager 0.113 (0.072) 0.113 (0.073) 0.118 (0.079) State-involvement −0.024 (.046) −0.024 (0.047) −0.02 (0.047) Sustainability office 0.058 (0.041) 0.06 (0.04) 0.057 (0.041) Population 0.056** (0.027) 0.056** (0.026) 0.044 (0.027) Population density −0.044 (0.039) −0.027 (0.04) −0.031 (0.043) Population change 0.0006** (0.038) −0.007 (0.039) 0.01 (0.039) N 683 683 683 Notes: *P < 0.1, ** P < 0.05, *** P <0 .01; standard errors in parentheses. Table 3 Imputed estimates of random-intercept poisson regression (MI = 20) Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Short-term savings −0.119*** (0.042) −0.118*** (0.043) −0.109** (0.042) Horizontal frag. 0.112* (0.068) 0.145** (0.069) H. frag. (squared) 0.018 (0.015) 0.024* (0.014) Vertical frag. 0.078* (0.047) 0.079* (0.048) V. frag. (squared) 0.031 (0.031) 0.037 (0.031) Age homogeneity −0.021 (0.041) Ethnic homogeneity −0.071* (0.042) Income difference −0.097* (0.057) Ethnic difference −0.0009 (0.044) Ideology difference 0.089** (0.036) Median income 0.019 (0.066) 0.041 (0.066) 0.145* (0.08) Education 0.017 (0.061) 0.01 (0.06) −0.004 (0.059) Mayor-council 0.122* (0.071) 0.123* (0.071) 0.128* (0.077) Council-manager 0.113 (0.072) 0.113 (0.073) 0.118 (0.079) State-involvement −0.024 (.046) −0.024 (0.047) −0.02 (0.047) Sustainability office 0.058 (0.041) 0.06 (0.04) 0.057 (0.041) Population 0.056** (0.027) 0.056** (0.026) 0.044 (0.027) Population density −0.044 (0.039) −0.027 (0.04) −0.031 (0.043) Population change 0.0006** (0.038) −0.007 (0.039) 0.01 (0.039) N 683 683 683 Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Short-term savings −0.119*** (0.042) −0.118*** (0.043) −0.109** (0.042) Horizontal frag. 0.112* (0.068) 0.145** (0.069) H. frag. (squared) 0.018 (0.015) 0.024* (0.014) Vertical frag. 0.078* (0.047) 0.079* (0.048) V. frag. (squared) 0.031 (0.031) 0.037 (0.031) Age homogeneity −0.021 (0.041) Ethnic homogeneity −0.071* (0.042) Income difference −0.097* (0.057) Ethnic difference −0.0009 (0.044) Ideology difference 0.089** (0.036) Median income 0.019 (0.066) 0.041 (0.066) 0.145* (0.08) Education 0.017 (0.061) 0.01 (0.06) −0.004 (0.059) Mayor-council 0.122* (0.071) 0.123* (0.071) 0.128* (0.077) Council-manager 0.113 (0.072) 0.113 (0.073) 0.118 (0.079) State-involvement −0.024 (.046) −0.024 (0.047) −0.02 (0.047) Sustainability office 0.058 (0.041) 0.06 (0.04) 0.057 (0.041) Population 0.056** (0.027) 0.056** (0.026) 0.044 (0.027) Population density −0.044 (0.039) −0.027 (0.04) −0.031 (0.043) Population change 0.0006** (0.038) −0.007 (0.039) 0.01 (0.039) N 683 683 683 Notes: *P < 0.1, ** P < 0.05, *** P <0 .01; standard errors in parentheses. The analysis offers more modest evidence (⁠ α = 0.1 in Model 3) that vertical fragmentation positively influences the number of collaborative mechanisms. We suggested this might be because special-districts or single-purpose governments are often better matches jurisdictionally to the spatial scale of ICA problems. Specialized governance allows authorities to internalize some externalities by scaling-up jurisdictional reach to the spatial dimension of collective-action problems. Mullin (2009) has posited that specialized governance allows officials in single-purpose governments to develop expertise in specific service areas. It is also possible that delegating greater service responsibilities such as social services, parks, public safety, and water supply decreases competition for mobile resources and frees up the time and focus on general-purpose governmental officials to pursuing collaboration. This requires additional research comparing metropolitan areas with higher and lower levels of specialized governance. It is clear that the spatial dimension of ICA problems—and by default, the institutions designed to steer preferences—influences the prevalence of integrative mechanisms. Turning to problem types, we had hypothesized (H2) that cities focused on short-term efficiencies would be more likely to pursue collaborative efforts to achieve scale-economies and this would lead to utilization of a smaller range of mechanisms. The ICA framework devotes considerable attention to the role that specific types of collective-action problems play in shaping how actors assess collaboration risk, and we find evidence that cities reporting short-term financial savings as a more important factor for pursuing sustainability engage in fewer collaborative activities, holding other factors constant (⁠ α = 0.01). This is consistent with the literature’s focus on the heightened defection risks in common-pool resource problems when individual actors have a short-term incentive to renege on agreements that involve limiting consumption. Cities which identify the short-term benefits of sustainability activities may be focused on a limited subset of ICA problems and less concerned with the longer-range repercussions of their actions, or they may be less capable of curtailing resource use. In regard to preference homophily, we hypothesized that the distribution of policy preferences across (H3) and within (H4) jurisdictions would inversely influence collaboration. Defection risks are thought to be the most serious collaboration risk in metropolitan regions with high economic, social, and demographic heterogeneity across jurisdictions, because such disparities and cleavages between cities complicates the political logic of collective action because dissimilar cities have different service-needs. The ICA approach stresses that communities with more social, demographic or cultural similarities should be more likely to work together, because policymakers face less risk from collaborating when answerable to similar constituencies. We find some evidence in support of our homophily hypothesis (H3) in that cities with higher median household incomes than their state (income difference) appear less likely to engage in a range of collaborative activities (⁠ α = 0.1), while the income measure overall (Median income) is positively associated with collaborative activities. Cities nested in counties which voted for Obama in greater proportions than their states were more likely to use more integrative mechanisms (⁠ α = 0.05). Because voter performance is measured at the county level, this result is consistent with our homophily expectation, because it implies that counties with more localities that are home to more liberal-leaning voters are more likely to collaborate across a broader range of activities. Cities which were more ideologically similar to their nearest neighbors and more liberal than the statewide mean were also more likely to be central cities in metropolitan regions. Central cities and suburbs have generally demonstrated cleavages of commitment to sustainability activities in other studies. Central cities tend to be more liberal-leaning, while prior research (Deslatte and Stokan 2017; Homsy and Warner 2014) has found suburban cities more likely to be free riders on regional sustainability efforts. Our evidence is consistent with that result, however motivations to free-ride are unlikely to be uniformly distributed across suburban areas. This may be why our income measure pooled across the entire sample has a positive coefficient, while the income difference measure grouped at the state level is negative; the more affluent a community is relative to its peers and nearby neighbors, the more dissimilar its preferences and perceptions of risk in collaborative endeavors (Deslatte, Feiock, and Wassel 2017). Also conforming to expectations, the analysis finds some evidence that communities which were more ethnically or racially homogenous engaged in fewer collaborative activities (⁠ α = 0.1). In the sample, these cities tended to be predominantly white and suburban. So, the quantitative analysis suggests homophily can positively influence collaboration between similarly affluent or liberal communities to a point. But high levels of homogeneous ethnic/racial population characteristics act as a drag on collaborative activities. We ascribed this finding to the potential that similar cities establish routines in collaborative relationships and stick with these trusted partners, resulting in either a failure to detect new opportunities or the perception that they come with greater collaboration risk. One important caveat to the quantitative analysis is that existing institutional arrangements such as fragmentation are linked historically in U.S. metropolitan regions to suburban migration, racist housing and development policies, labor market shifts, and prior distributional conflicts which have sorted populations across jurisdictions. In other words, preferences for population sorting have driven fragmentation, while fragmentation in turn has facilitated more sorting. This interdependence in the spatial distribution of wealth, jobs, and ethnic concentration across metropolitan regions is ubiquitous in urban studies. To better elucidate these quantitative findings, we analyzed the reported preferences of public managers in a cross-stitch of Chicago suburban communities that reflect this historical context. The Collaborative Riskscape in a Fragmented Metropolis To illustrate these findings, we qualitatively explored the divergent preferences and types of collective-action problems local governments tackle through interviews with Chicago-area city managers. Our quantitative analysis found evidence that cities led by “strong mayors” were more likely to engage in a broader array of collaborative mechanisms, and the interviews with managers corroborate this result. This is consistent with extant local government scholarship which has found local executive and legislative structures influence the motivations and strategies of policy actors (Frederickson, Johnson, and Wood 2004; Nelson and Svara 2014). Cities organized under council-manager form of government, for instance, may approach sustainability policies with a greater long-term orientation, but are thought to adopt “business-like” approaches in keeping with their professional norms of efficiency and conserving fiscal resources (Deslatte, Swann, and Feiock 2017). Cities led by strong mayors tend to favor policies which provide shorter-term credit claiming opportunities for elected officials (Clingermayer and Feiock 2001). Of the twenty city administrators in mayor-council cities (n = 7) and managers in council-manager governments (n = 13), sixteen identified short-term efficiency gains as a primary motivator for sustainability. These cities generally engaged in formalized, joint-purchasing collaborations for green products. “It is kind of like the new vogue is sustainability,” said one interviewee. “I always said the only green I am interested in is saving money. If it saves us money, I'm interested.” Because ICA dilemmas include efficiency losses from incoordination, costs incurred from spillovers, and common-pool resource loss, one implication is that a city’s prioritization of scale-economy ICA problems may stem in part from the norms associated with professionalized public administration in cities. Norms of reciprocity and trust, combined with a corporate-style professional management orientation, play a key role in cities where the policy agenda is heavily influenced by professional public managers. Thus, city bureaucracies incentivized to pursue efficiencies may routinize the search for partners equally interested in solving the same problems. A sustainability focus on gains from scale-economies “hits at the heart of what professional managers think is important, and that’s efficient use of resources,” said one manager. Moreover, some policy objectives of urban sustainability—clean air and water regulation, climate-change mitigation and adaptation—are viewed as partisan issues. The vast majority of managers explained that sustainability initiatives which promote fiscal conservative positions are more palatable within their jurisdictions, and are perceived as “lower risk” if they’ve demonstrated fiscal benefits. “If we hear that it’s proven, then we’ll try it,” said one. This further elucidates the ecology of games theoretical arguments that greater transaction costs and cognitive limitations are imposed when policy actors operate to solve interrelated problems in multiple venues. Since sustainability problems are multidimensional and require different integrative mechanisms, focusing on one type of ICA problem stems not only from information overload and the limited resources of policymakers but also the prior beliefs and motivated reasoning of professional managers more likely to devote their efforts to solving specific politically or culturally “appropriate” types of problems. In contrast, spillover problems were identified as a greater source of collaboration risk given the complexity of environmental concerns and inability to internalize many of the benefits of collective action. Nine interviewees identified preferences for environmental stewardship within their localities. But the activities identified to promote environmental stewardship were concentrated on activities cities could implement alone or easily internalize the gains from, such as tree preservation, recycling programs, and aggregating energy use with less attention paid to issues such as mass transit, water reclamation, and climate-change mitigation. A majority of these cities had adopted sustainability plans and participated in formal regional networks dealing with sustainability issues. While these cities also engaged in joint-purchasing, collaborations involving spillovers were predominantly informal, information-sharing networks. However, the lack of neighboring jurisdictions which shared their own pro-environmental preferences was cited as a barrier to the use of additional integrative mechanisms. To explore these divergent preferences, we highlight the defection risks between two affluent, inner-ring suburbs in Cook County. A city we call Alphatown, an inner-ring suburb of Chicago, has a climate-action plan, a sustainability coordinator, and a national certification for its sustainability commitments. Although the city manager has attempted to negotiate shared-service agreements with some of its neighbors, those efforts had been unsuccessful, which the manager attributed to a lack of political leadership on environmental issues amongst its neighbors. “I think most of the communities around us are very inwardly focused,” he said. “There’s no value for risk-taking, and that’s been sad.” One neighboring jurisdiction, which we call Betaville, was purposively selected for the study due to its reputation for joint-purchasing through a network of local governments, along with shared-service arrangements, outsourcing, and other collaborative management innovations intended to create scale-economies for its regional partners. While the two cities are neighbors, Alphatown’s manager said the two communities have largely avoided collaborating because they had value conflicts. “Well, [Betaville’s] values are cutting costs at whatever the cost,” he said. “All that matters is the bottom line.” Meanwhile, Betaville’s manager identified cost-savings as the primary motivator for organizational decision-making, describing the concept of sustainability as unattainable. “We would like to think there’s sustainability; that way we wouldn’t have to make any more tough decisions. But I don’t think it’s reasonable,” he said. “We’re lucky to be able to predict two to three years into the future. There’s certain things that are known – how you’re doing at the time, what contracts you’ve got coming up, union deals, who your board’s going to be – but other than that, I think it’s a management-term farce.” Here, coordination risk is low given the two cities’ familiarity with each other and experience with coordination networks, but division and defection risks are high due to the divergent preferences for social benefits and environmental stewardship within their respective communities and political leadership. In this instance, participants discounted the benefits of any type of collaboration according to the degree of uncertainty they have regarding each other’s motivations and intent. Preference homogeneity exists within each community while preference heterogeneity exists between the communities. One example of where collaboration risks were overcome is the 2005 creation of the DuPage River Salt Creek Work Group, which was formed in response to state and federal efforts under the federal Clean Water Act to regulate pollution levels in the DuPage River and Salt Creek. Due to “similarities of water quality issues, development patterns and multiple agency/organizational overlap,” some thirty-seven cities and villages in Cook, DuPage, and Will counties, the Illinois Department of Transportation, eleven special districts, and a number of private firms and environmental organizations formed the consortium to plan for water monitoring and remediation projects.2 As the city manager of one local government member described, collaboration in the consortium was a salient concern necessitated by “the [U.S. Environment Protection Agency] regulations that are coming up particularly fast for us.” Common-pool resource problems such as these are often difficult to resolve due to defection risks. Each party within this watershed has had a decades-long incentive to continue polluting the resource rather than taking corrective actions by themselves. In this instance, localities were willing to commit to decades-long coordination of their activities only after public attention was heightened by the potential for state and federal regulatory involvement which could have proven more costly for impacted stakeholders. Discussion and Conclusion Local governments should be willing to consider collaborative activities when it is in their self-interest to do so. The persistence of inaction and underutilization of collaboration in such contexts requires a deeper theoretical understanding of the conditional nature of institutional collective action. Fragmentation is often blamed for creating collective-action problems. This study suggests it may also provide more potential bargaining partners with which to negotiate collaborative solutions. If homophily reduces the transaction costs for collaboration between similarly situated cities, fragmentation increases the odds a city will find such potential partners. However, local governments must commit resources to identify willing and trustworthy partners. The sorting of diverse populations into homogenous localities—leading to routinized searches for collaborative opportunities—appears to mitigate many of the advantages of polycentricity. Sustainability is conceptualized as an assortment of biophysical, economic, and social challenges for local governments characterized by economies of scale, externalities, and common-pool resource challenges. As such, the nature of an institutional collective action dilemma not only influences the integrative mechanism required, but also shapes which problems policy actors choose to address. For some sustainability problems, local governments can achieve efficiencies merely by coordinating similar activities. We find evidence that more horizontally fragmented systems may make such coordination easier, perhaps because fragmentation introduces more potential partners into a policy arena and creates conditions in which such scale economies can be more easily achieved. However, our analysis also suggests cities with clear opportunities for collaboration fail to capitalize on them. As metropolitan regions become more internally homogenized and collaborate only with similar-looking communities, the overall picture is bleak for cities to find broader resolution of spillover and common-pool ICA problems. If this pattern is true, the distribution of preferences across metropolitan regions poses significant limits to the range of sustainability problems local governments can be expected to address on their own. This study has helped to clarify the role of fragmentation, problem type and preference sorting, but it is far from conclusive. To diagnose collaboration barriers in more fragmented regions such as Chicago, the evidence suggests that patterns of interaction over time work against solving larger externalities due to routinization of search. Further investigation is necessary to develop a holistic understanding of the role of information-processing through homophily and partitioned authority in local governance. Nevertheless, these findings have some practical importance for intergovernmental collaboration and resolving disagreements between proponents of regional consolidation and decentralization. Mechanisms such as regional councils designed to help reduce information costs for local governments may be insufficient to overcome all collaboration risks when communities sorted along preference divides lack shared values and a commitment to intergenerational planning. Conversely, regional authorities may have a more effective role to play in explicitly identifying localities where searches have been routinized and collaborative strategies to solve larger-order spillover problems are being overlooked. Localities with diverse needs may be able to overcome not just information asymmetries but division risks when the potential for internalizing spillovers are made more evident. This type of regional role has traditionally been thought of as a way to reduce information costs, but its benefit may extend to facilitating negotiations over equitable division of costs and benefits and enforcing agreements. A middle-ground coordination role for regional actors could have normative appeal for both sides of the regionalism debate in contemporary metropolitan areas. Footnotes This project was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant awards SES-1461460 and CBT-1444745. 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TI - The Collaboration Riskscape: Fragmentation, Problem Types and Preference Divergence in Urban Sustainability
JF - Publius: The Journal of Federalism
DO - 10.1093/publius/pjy020
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-collaboration-riskscape-fragmentation-problem-types-and-preference-6rPiJqk51t
SP - 352
VL - 49
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -