Richard C. Feiock – författare

This book investigates the self-organizing responses of governments and interests to the institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas of particular concern to students of federalism, urban governance, and regional management of natural resources. ICA dilemmas arise in fragmented systems whenever decisions by one independent formal authority do not consider costs or benefits imposed on others. The ICA framework analyzes networks, joint projects, partnerships, and other mechanisms developed by affected parties to mitigate ICA decision externalities. These mechanisms play a widespread role in federalist systems by reshaping incentives to encourage coordination/cooperation. The empirical studies of urban service delivery and regional integration of regional resource management address three questions: How does a given mechanism mitigate costs of uncoordinated decisions? What incentives do potential members have to create the mechanism? How do incentives induced by the mitigating mechanism affect its sustainability in a changing environment and its adaptability to other ICA dilemmas?

City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.

Demonstrates how governmental structure and institutional rules determine who gets what in American cities.Institutional arrangements constitute the "rules of the game" for any civil and political society. To understand urban politics and policy making, including issues dealing with economic development, zoning, constituency representation, government borrowing, and service contract decisions, discovering institutional regularities is key. To achieve this the authors combine older institutional approaches emphasizing formal structure and governance organizations with newer approaches and transaction cost theory. Institutional Constraints and Policy Choice contends that institutional arrangements both shape and are shaped by human behavior, and when combined with contextual factors and the uncertainty associated with leadership turnover provide the basis of understanding how decisions are made at the level of local government.

"Metropolitan Governance" is the first book to bring together competing perspectives on the question and consequences of centralized vs. decentralized regional government. Presenting original contributions by some of the most notable names in the field of urban politics, this volume examines the organization of governments in metropolitan areas, and how that has an effect on both politics and policy. Existing work on metropolitan governments debates the consequences of interjurisdictional competition, but neglects the role of cooperation in a decentralized system. Feiock and his contributors provide evidence that local governments successfully cooperate through a web of voluntary agreements and associations, and through collective choices of citizens. This kind of "institutional collective action" is the glue that holds institutionally fragmented communities together. The theory of institutional collective action developed here illustrates the dynamics of decentralized governance and identifies the various ways governments cooperate and compete. "Metropolitan Governance" provides insight into the central role that municipal governments play in the governance of metropolitan areas.It explores the theory of institutional collective action through empirical studies of land use decisions, economic development, regional partnerships, school choice, morality issues, and boundary change - among other issues. A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive analytical inquiry invaluable for students of political science, urban and regional planning, and public administration - as well as for scholars of urban affairs and urban politics and policymakers - "Metropolitan Governance" blazes new territory in the urban landscape.