Prospects for Regional Governance under the New Regionalism: Economic Imperatives versus Political Impediments

Abstract

Over the past two decades or more, advocates of the new regionalism have called for the creation of new forms of regional governance in America. These writers have shifted the rationale for regional governance from issues of efficiency and equity that characterized an earlier literature on regionalism (i.e., the metropolitan reform school) to that of regional economic competitiveness. In this article, I examine the diagnoses and prescriptions of the metropolitan reformers and the new regionalists. I offer a definition of regional governance more in keeping with the older tradition of political science and distinctly at odds with that of the new regionalist. Then I present what I believe are the principal factors that make the achievement of regional governance in American metropolitan areas very close to impossible. My argument, as indicated by the title of this article, is that political impediments overwhelm economic arguments for achieving meaningful regional governance.Over the past two decades or more, scholars and advocates of the new regionalism school have written a number of works calling for the creation of new forms of regional governance in American metropolitan areas (. Regardless of the specific forms of regional governance advocated by the new regionalists, these authors appear to have essentially the same purposes in mind. The first is the establishment of formal or informal methods of combining local governments in metropolitan regions to promote cooperation across a range of issues on the theory that such cooperation will enable regions to be more competitive in the global economy.A second purpose has been to address, through mechanisms of regional governance, the negative externalities or spill-over effects produced by uncontrolled development within governmentally fragmented metropolitan areas. A final purpose has been to use the newly established

Metropolitan governance(or not!) in Poland and the United States

“…We are guided in this paper by a definition of metropolitan governance (Norris 2001), which is slightly modified for our purposes here (see also Brenner, 2002: 5).…”

“…More than a decade ago, one of the authors concluded that in the U.S. the economic premises of the New Regionalism are insufficient to overcome the political factors preventing metro reform (Norris 2001). Moreover, except for the slight hope that rescaling in Europe may bring, these factors are not likely to change and are likely to have the same effect in the future that they have had in the past -that of preventing the emergence of metro governance.…”

“…The pressure to act as a strong political agent on the international scene may pose a new mobilization for metropolitan governance. This mobilization responds to the political nature of the impediments identified by Norris (2001) and perhaps can be expected to work better than the economic argument of the New Regionalism. In any event, the economic premises of New Regionalism were more effective in European context than they were in American.…”

“…Launching and maintaining cooperation in city regions over the tough issues that confront those regions is neither more popular nor any easier under the New Regionalism than it was under the old. This is because political impediments cannot be overcome by economic imperatives (Norris 2001). Looking at the literature, we find a lot of factors favoring metropolitan reform (Heinelt, Kubler 2005, OECD 2007.…”

The Area-wide Economic Regions in Korea: Orthodox New Regionalism or Politically-inflicted Regionalism?

“…These matters are constructed as distributional issues in and across metropolitan areas, including continuing sprawl, hollowing-out of the central cities of older metropolitan areas through population and tax base decentralization, traffic congestion, pollution, and the like (Orfield 1997;Norris 2001;Brenner 2002;Wheeler 2002). These policy issues just represent the new forms of sociospatial polarization and uneven geographical development that have been crystallizing in the American city-regions under contemporary conditions of postfordist urbanization and neoliberal state restructuring (Brenner 2002).…”