Intergovernmental Alignment, Program Effectiveness, and U.S. Homelessness Policy

Abstract

In the U.S. intergovernmental system, state governments can voluntarily and strategically align with federal government strategies and objectives. This study examines the effect of intergovernmental alignment on federal homelessness program outcomes. In 2010, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness started the first national level comprehensive strategic plan on homelessness: Opening Doors. The Opening Doors plan highlights intergovernmental partnerships as effective tools to implement federal homeless programs to different levels of governments in order to achieve federal outcomes. Using a Difference-inDifferences methodology, we find that county governments that align their homelessness program with the federal and state government have better program outcomes than those county governments that do not align intergovernmentally. Our findings help to expand our understanding of intergovernmental mechanisms as effective policy tools to achieve federal program outcomes at the local level in the absence of financial inducements or legal mandates.

Political power, local policy uncertainty and IPO pricing

“…7 While governors and state legislators have no role in crafting federal policies, by constitution they may have a certain amount of discretion in how they implement a federal policy (Lee and McGuire, 2017). In this respect, alignment between national and local government may be relevant in our context.…”

Conceptualizing an Interdisciplinary Collective Impact Approach to Examine and Intervene in the Chronic Cycle of Homelessness

“…Public administration scholars have also studied the organizational patterns of homeless service delivery. This work has shown that effective administrative outcomes are more likely to be generated by public actors working across inter-agency [ 52 ] and inter-governmental boundaries [ 53 , 54 ], as well as with private [ 55 , 56 , 57 ], and non-profit partners [ 58 ], highlighting the critical nature of collaborative work to address homelessness. For example, an analysis of 145 county-level strategic plans in the United States found that governments that worked in partnership with a diversity of leaders from other organizations were more effectively able to increase the number of available beds for members of their communities than governments that either did not develop strategic plans or did so without explicit collaboration [ 59 ].…”

Practices of scalecraft and the reassembling of political boundaries: the contested nature of national schooling reform in the Australian federation

“…AITSL, however, was established as a federally-owned organization, accountable to the federal Minister for Education and Training, even though its remit is to develop national reforms. 6 We see AITSL's federal ownership as symbolic of the fact that while national agreements and processes of "intergovernmental alignment" (Lee and McGuire 2017) are portrayed "on paper" as emerging from democratic forms of policy collaboration and co-design, Australian reforms have in practice been powerfully driven by successive federal governments, from both major parties, which have financially incentivised and sought to steer national reforms in line with federal political agendas. For example, major federal funding initiatives and increases over the past decade have been conditional upon state and territory support for national reform and require ongoing reporting to the federal government against common metrics (e.g.…”