Community Scale And Regional Governance

This is the second of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by the functional pressures that arise from the logic of scale in providing public goods and by the preferences that people have regarding self-government. The first has to do with the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. The second has to do with how people conceive and construct the groups to which they feel themselves belonging. In this book, the authors demonstrate that scale and community are principles that can help explain some basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades, how jurisdictions are designed, why governance within the state has become differentiated, and the extent to which regions exert authority. The authors propose a postfunctionalist theory which rejects the notion that form follows function, and argue that whilst functional pressures are enduring, one must engage human passions regarding self-rule to explain variation in the structures of rule over time and around the world. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

This is the first of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state and for social scientists who take measurement seriously. The book sets out a measure of regional authority for 81 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific from 1950 to 2010. Subnational authority is exercised by individual regions, and this measure is the first that takes individual regions as the unit of analysis. On the premise that transparency is a fundamental virtue in measurement, the authors chart a new path in laying out their theoretical, conceptual, and scoring decisions before the reader. The book also provides summaries of regional governance in 81 countries for scholars and students alike. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

Holistic in approach, this Handbook’s international range of leading scholars present complementary perspectives, both theoretical and empirically pertinent, to explore recent developments in the field of local and regional governance.

This book sets out a measure of authority for seventy-six international organizations (IOs) from 1950, or the time of their establishment, to 2010 which can allow researchers to test expectations about the character, sources, and consequences of international governance. The international organizations considered are regional (e.g. the EU, Andean Community, NAFTA), cross-regional (e.g. Commonwealth of Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), and global (e.g. the UN, World Bank, WTO). Firstly, the book introduces carefully constructed estimates for the scope and depth of authority exercised by international governments. The estimates are unique in their comparative scope, their specificity, and time span. Secondly, it describes describe broad trends in IO authority by comparing delegation and pooling, over time, across IOs, and across decision areas. Thirdly, it presents the evidence gathered by the authors to estimate international authority by carefully discussing forty-seven international organizations, and showing how their bodies are composed, what decisions each body makes, and how they make decisions.

How should the metropolis be governed? What is the appropriate scale to consider and organize local governance and communities? Bringing together an interdisciplinary and international body of scholarly work, City-Regions in Prospect? explores the city-region as both an evolving concept and as a growing area of planning practice. Contributors raise critical questions about the ways in which governance reform is being reshaped and whether current trends towards rescaling and rebounding cities actually address local challenges of urbanization and globalization. These essays highlight the tensions and uncertainties between the city-region as a concept and the experiences of local communities when municipal policies are applied. Proposing a challenge to scholars and municipal leaders to account for flexibility, adaptability to local contexts, social robustness, and community engagement, City-Regions in Prospect? Captures the growing relevance and importance of cities in a rapidly urbanizing world.

This is the second of five volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that juristictional design is shaped by functional and communal pressures. Functional pressures arise from the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalisties, and informational asymmetries. However, to explain demands for self-rule one needs to understand how people think and act in relation to the communities they conceive themselves belonging. The authors demonstrate: the scale and community explain basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades; how jurisdictions are designed; why governance within the state has become differentiated; and the extent to which regions exert authority. -- book jacket.

Creating metropolitan regions that are more efficient, equitable, and sustainable depends on the willingness of local officials to work together across municipal boundaries to solve large-scale problems. How do these local officials think? Why do they only sometimes cooperate? What kind of governance do they choose in the face of persistent problems? The Risk of Regional Governance offers a new perspective on these questions. Drawing on theory from sociology and anthropology, it argues that many of the most important cooperative decisions local officials make—those about land use planning and regulation—are driven by heuristic, biased reasoning driven by cultural values. The Risk of Regional Governance builds a sociocultural collective action framework, and supports it with rich survey and interview data from hundreds of local elected officials serving in the suburbs of Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a story of the Rust Belt, of how local officials think about their community and the region, and—most importantly—of how we might craft policies that can overcome biases against regional governance.