Cooperative and Collaborative Regionalism

Abstract

This chapter covers cooperative and collaborative regionalism. As discussed in Chap. 1, this type of regionalism maintains the basic government structure that already exists in the region. Policy and service issues of a regional nature are handled on an ad hoc basis through cooperation among local governments and collaboration with interested nongovernmental actors. This type of regionalism is the general model in the USA since most efforts to consolidate governments or establish an over-arching tier were unsuccessful. Since regional policy and service issues were becoming more urgent, this approach was advocated and applied as a way to address regional issues. There was also interest in collaborative regionalism among practitioners and social scientists. Dodge (1996) and Barnes and Ledebur (1998) argued that continuing to debate the merits of whether a centralized or decentralized system of government was superior and sorting out the roles of governments in regions was counterproductive to achieving effective regionalism. They argued that reorienting the debate away from whether centralization or decentralization is in the public’s best interest to one of focusing the debate on solving substantive regional issues opens up new ways of addressing regionalism and developing solutions. The focus then shifts to governance instead of government and policy instead of structural arrangements. It encourages a sharing of roles and a more inclusive and open regional policy process. They argued that questions surrounding structure were not as important as addressing regional policy issues. This new approach recognized that the debate over whether a centralized or decentralized system was in the public’s best interest was un-winnable. This was a more inclusive, pragmatic approach that asked the question: Given the regional policy issues and the polycentric local government system, what can be done to effectively address regional governance issues?