More than five decades have passed since Charles Tiebout wrote his seminal 1956 paper, often cited as the classic apologetic for locally based systems of metropolitan governance. This essay traces the impact of Tiebout’s work and subsequent scholarship in public choice, identifying important lessons and lingering issues. Although public choice has demonstrated that polycentric systems are adept and flexible in producing and providing municipal services and a variety of interlocal agreements, the presence of municipal boundaries gives rise to a host of spillover problems, such as urban sprawl and segregation. These spillovers are particularly nefarious because, unlike the natural cooperation that seems to occur in service provision, municipalities tend to assert narrow self‐interest in the face of these types of externalities. The essay proposes that, commensurate with the growing salience of equity among the pillars of public administration, interjurisdictional spillovers and their attendant equity impacts will be the central challenge for thinkers studying metropolitan governance in the 21st century.

where she teaches in the master of public administration program. Her current research interests include intergovernmental relations, nonprofi t and government performance measurement, and nonprofi t advances in technology.

No abstract

Driven by negative externalities from suburban sprawl, many states in the US have adopted comprehensive growth management legislation in an effort to regulate land development more directly. Most extant scholarship evaluating the effects of growth management programmes employs a design that averages growth management's effect across all of the growth management states. Yet, this approach largely ignores descriptive analyses of individual state growth management approaches which show large variation in both the methods and intensity of means by which states manage growth. This paper seeks to ascertain if differences in growth management intensity yield different evaluative outcomes. Analysis of panel data for nine growth management states using fixed effects regressions, across eight different model specifications, shows that only states with the strongest growth management intensity experience consistent success at reducing the expansion of urban land and increasing population densities.

Following failed auctions for sewer debt in April 2008, major bond rating companies downgraded Jefferson County, Alabama’s bond rating to D (default) triggering massive mandatory payments by the county to its creditors. At the time of writing, the county teeters on the brink of actual default and bankruptcy, unable to pay service on its $3.3 billion sewer debt portfolio. If the county defaults, it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, eclipsing Orange County, California’s 1994 default. The intriguingly complex tale of the Jefferson County debt crisis is recounted here by identifying and examining failures of transparency and accountability by local bureaucratic and political actors, private financial institutions, as well as the larger regulatory framework governing public finance. Enhanced regulation of local government and the financial sector plus greater local government capacity to close accountability gaps and thus prevent future crises of similar scale in this or other jurisdictions are recommended.