GLOBALIZATION'S IMPACT ONSTATE AND LOCAL POLICY: The Rise of Regional Cluster‐Based Economic Development Strategies1

We propose proactive policies which allow state and local governments to participate in the global economy, offering opportunities and venues for effective development. We first develop the argument that the changing economic conditions associated with globalization call for a new approach to state‐local economic development policy. We then outline three assumptions which are critical to drive successful state and local economic development policy in a global environment. The major part of the analysis describes this new strategy of “regional cluster‐based economic development,” drawing extensively upon a case study of Cleveland's economic revitalization.     

How to organize secondary capital city regions: Institutional drivers of locational policy coordination

We analyze locational policy coordination in the metropolitan regions of secondary capital cities. Secondary capital cities—defined as capitals that are not the primary economic city of their nation states—serve as the political center of their nation states; however, they must simultaneously explore new ways to develop their own regional economies. Locational policies, and their regional coordination, aim to strengthen the economic competitiveness of metropolitan regions. Our comparison of the metropolitan regions of Bern, Ottawa–Gatineau, The Hague, and Washington, D.C., reveals that vertical institutional fragmentation, together with high local tax autonomy, create an unlevel playing field, which prompts jurisdictions to behave fiercely in regional tax competition. These findings are troubling for secondary capital cities given their propensity to be located in fragmented metropolitan regions and the capital city‐specific local tax autonomy constraints imposed on them.     

EXPORTING AMERICAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE TO RUSSIA

The failure of US initiatives to build local/regional economic development capacity in Russia following the fall of Communism has been partly blamed on national factors, Russian culture, and American consultants. Much of the failure, however, probably resulted because American approaches to economic development—‐highly successful in other contexts—could not work during Russia's transition from a command economy to its current state. Such things as promoting entrepreneurship, developing public‐private partnerships, creating a market economy, accessing start‐up capital, attracting foreign investment, overcoming bureaucratic corruption and high taxation, working within the rule of law, and negating organized crime either should not have been done, or could not have been done, leaving many of our programs ineffective. We ask whether the Russian deviations from the U.S. model have any implications for the current situation facing state and local development policy in the U.S.     

Patterns of Local Policy Disruption: Regulatory Responses to Uber in Ten North American Cities

Since its inception in 2009, Uber has grown into a technology behemoth, with operations in over 70 countries and 500 cities around the world. Along the way, it has successfully forced regulatory upheaval in hundreds of local taxi markets controlled by municipal authorities. In this sense, Uber is not only a market disruptor, but also a policy disruptor. This paper examines the nature of such policy disruption at the local level by reviewing regulatory responses to Uber in ten North American cities. We find that regulatory outcomes are a function of two factors: Uber’s government relations strategy, either cooperative or confrontational, and the degree to which local governments perceive Uber as complementary or harmful to the existing marketplace. We conclude by proposing a typology of regulatory responses to Uber as a basis to identify patterns in the behavior of municipal regulatory authorities and political leaders.     

Local housing plans: Learning from Great Britain

Abstract

As the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development refines the new Consolidated Plans, which replace the Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategies, it should examine Britain's experience with local housing plans. Case studies of four best‐practice cities—Glasgow, Dundee, Birmingham, and York—highlight the value of these plans in assessing the success of cities in their new “enabler” role.

Five key lessons for American cities emerge from this article. First, these plans can serve multiple roles beyond bids to central government. Second, local housing plans should address market‐rate as well as below‐market‐rate housing issues. Third, American housing plans should use a wider range of data sources than census information alone and should incorporate housing market analyses dealing with specific areas and population groups. Fourth, the stress on implementation and strategy in British plans should be emulated. Finally, aspects of Britain's competitive bidding system should be considered for implementation.     

Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System

This analysis explores the role of city‐level and state‐level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate‐related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom‐up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self‐interest in an increasingly global economy.     

Evaluating the success of urban success stories: Is reputation a guide to best practice?

Abstract

Do the reputations of central cities that have reportedly revitalized match reality? Can reputation alone be used to select best practices in urban public policy? In replicating research conducted a decade ago, we asked a panel of urban and economic development experts to identify, out of the universe of large, distressed central cities in 1990, those that had successfully revitalized between 1990 and 2000. We compared the performance of these successful cities with the performance of cities not perceived to be successful on a composite index of the change in the economic well‐being of residents from 1990 to 2000, as well as on a weighted index of economic, social, fiscal, and demographic change between 1990 and 2000.

Regardless of which index was used, there was a low correlation between reputation and reality. We draw lessons from this experiment on relying on best practice reputations in formulating and propagating public policies.     

Portable Innovation,Policy Wormholes,and Innovation Diffusion

This article explores the effects of city managers' career paths on the diffusion of climate policy innovation among municipal governments in the United States. Using the agent network diffusion (AND) model, the authors hypothesize that local climate policy innovations are portable and that cities may learn from distant jurisdictions to which they are connected through the career paths of managers, a phenomenon termed the “policy wormhole” effect. Employing a dyadic panel data set of more than 400 Florida cities from 2005 to 2010, these hypotheses are tested using dyadic event history analysis. The results support both the portable innovation hypothesis and the policy wormhole hypothesis. Cities can facilitate the diffusion of policy innovations by paying special attention to the recruitment process of city managers.     

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.     

A Bridge in Flux: Narratives and the Policy Process in the Pacific Northwest

Policy narratives play an important role in the policy process. Often policy narratives originate from advocacy coalitions seeking increased support from the public for their policy stance. Although most Narrative Policy Framework studies have focused on national policy issues, this study examines a state and local economic development project by exploring the policy narratives from competing coalitions in favor and opposed to the project. Specifically, in the Portland–Vancouver area of Oregon and Washington, local policy discussions have been dominated by a proposal for a new mega bridge on Interstate‐5 connecting the two cities across the Columbia River. A new government agency (CRC—Columbia River Crossing) was formed for the implementation of this project. Upon approval of a proposal, CRC experienced heavy backlash from citizens, local businesses, community leaders, and other stakeholders leading to the formation of two competing coalitions in opposition and support of the bridge. This study, using content analysis of 370 public documents, finds that competing coalitions utilize policy narratives in strategic ways to characterize the opposing coalition, themselves, and other actors in the policy subsystem. This study also suggests that the strength and cohesion of a coalition's narrative contributes to its policy success and the winning/losing status of a coalition potentially determines the types of strategies they will use. Last, this study introduces and tests a new narrative strategy called the impotent shift testing a coalition's strategic use of the victim character.     

Comparing Urban Citizenship,Sanctuary Cities,Local Bureaucratic Membership,and Regularizations

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities respond to this phenomenon with a variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants. These urban policies produce a disparity between local inclusion and national exclusion. This article describes and compares such urban policies, namely, urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. Urban citizenship serves as the normative foundation of these policies because it claims membership for all people who inhabit a city. Regularization programs confer national residency status on irregular migrants. Pro‐immigration actors favor this policy; however, when regularizations are not possible, cities can turn to sanctuary city and local bureaucratic membership policies. It is important for practitioners to comprehend and engage with these types of urban policies since they are likely to travel to cities worldwide.     

THE USE OF BARGAINING GAMES IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Granting location incentives is a common city policy to attract new businesses, despite the frequent belief that the benefits are too generous. Can cities do a better job determining when to agree to these concessions and when to refuse? I argue that analyzing the concession decision with a simple bargaining game illustrates: (1) that the negotiation strategy a city uses should be based on the characteristics of the firm in each case and (2) that even poor cities with few attractive location features can avoid making large concessions. Development experiences in Miami‐Dade are used to illustrate the model.     

Distributive politics,ward representation,and the spread of zoning

This analysis examines two alternative explanations for the adoption of comprehensive zoning ordinances in the years immediately following its initial adoption in New York City. The market failure explanation predicts zoning adoption in cities where externality problems (represented by heavy incidence of manufacturing) exist. The distributive policymaking model treats zoning as a form of regulation that is most likely to be found in cities where local legislators are elected from geographically-concentrated constituencies (e.g., wards) and therefore try to target policy benefits to their own constituencies while spreading the policy costs over all constituencies. Some support is found for each model. Especially striking is the interactive effect of ward representation and of economic interest (i.e., levels of home ownership).     

Urban renewal as policy innovation in China: From growth stimulation to sustainable development

A major policy innovation in China, urban renewal creates an opportunity to promote sustainable inner‐city development and to foster economic growth in an environmentally and culturally sound way, which demands a close investigation of its context, internal and external dynamics, and policy features. Property‐led redevelopment dominated China's urban renewal since the early 1990s, as a result of the market reform and political decentralization. Recently, it has become important to meet the interests of local communities and the diverse stakeholders in the effort to preserve the urban history and cultural fabric of cities. Contextual factors in urban renewal policy and its innovation are investigated by analyzing a pioneering case in Guangzhou from a longitudinal study approach. The impact of the structural‐instrumental, cultural‐institutional, and environmental perspective on policy innovation with the change of contextual factors that transformed the development ideology and the managerial practice are identified to provide a new angle of studying policy innovation in the urban field.     

The relevance,practicality and viability of spatial development initiatives: a South African case study

Policymakers have for long had an ambivalent attitude towards space and have been hesitant in dealing with intra‐national models of uneven development. Issues surrounding regional development have always been tainted with ideological and political influences rather than being a purely economic consideration. This article addresses the thinking behind regional development policies and questions the role of spatial policy. It confronts this question in the South African case where local government capacity is particularly constrained and the boundaries between government tiers unclear. The first section outlines a selected critical history of the regional policy literature as it applies to South Africa. This is followed by an examination of South Africa's post‐apartheid policy of spatial development initiatives (SDIs) focusing on the most contentious of these, namely the Fish River SDI, which has been plagued by controversy. It focuses on the tensions involved in development planning between government agencies and between politicians and technocrats. It also highlights the growing schism between government and civil society with the former emphasising mega‐projects which reinforce its global competitive strategy but with limited apparent benefit to the local community. Lastly, it concludes that little effort was made to integrate the SDI into a provincial poverty strategy and argues that instead of utilising industrial decentralisation to redress inequality and poverty, a ‘first‐best’ option may be for the government to target poverty directly by investing in various forms of human capital. Such an approach would lead to long‐term economic growth and also improve South Africa's international competitiveness. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The emergence of stable racially and ethnically diverse urban communities: A case study of nine U.S. cities

Abstract

We examine the characteristics of 14 stable racially and ethnically diverse urban communities in 9 U.S. cities and point to policies that could strengthen these communities and encourage the growth of more diverse neighborhoods in American cities. The cities examined are Chicago; Denver; Houston; Memphis, TN; Milwaukee; New York; Oakland, CA; Philadelphia; and Seattle. University researchers and community leaders in each city collaborated on the research for this project.

We identify two types of stable diverse communities, “self‐conscious” and “laissez‐faire,” which have evolved for different reasons and with different characteristics. Stable diverse communities will not just happen, but they can be influenced by a number of policy recommendations stemming from our research. These include helping individuals and organizations take leadership roles in their communities, strengthening and enforcing fair housing and antidiscrimination laws, earmarking economic resources to encourage neighborhood diversity, and creating community safety and jobs programs.     

What drives the diffusion of inclusionary zoning?

Social scientists offer competing theories on what explains the policymaking process. These typically include economic rationalism, political competition or power struggles, and policy imitation of the kind that diffuses across spatially proximate neighbors. In this paper, we examine the factors that have influenced a recent local policy trend in California: inclusionary zoning (IZ). IZ programs require developers to make a certain percentage of the units within their market‐rate residential developments affordable to low‐ or moderate‐income households. By 2007, 68 percent of jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area had adopted some type of IZ policy. We test the relative importance of economic, political, and spatial factors in explaining the rapid diffusion of IZ, across 100 cities and towns in the Bay Area. Consistent with an economic efficiency argument, results of hazard models provide some evidence that IZ is adopted in places with less affordable housing. However, political factors, such as partisan affiliation and the strength of affordable housing nonprofits, are even more robust predictors of whether or not a local government adopts IZ. There is no evidence of spatial diffusion in the case of IZ adoption; jurisdictions are not, on average, responding to the behavior of their neighbors. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Comment on Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel's “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification”

Abstract

Gentrification ought to be examined, for policy purposes, as part of a general restructuring of the space of cities resulting from broader changes in the nature, location, control, and effects of economic processes. However, even if it is narrowly seen as simply residential change, as in the article by Wyly and Hammel, the displacement of poor households by an upper‐income gentry ought not be confused with the effort to mix moderate with low incomes in public housing through the best of HOPE VI.

Despite this confusion, Wyly and Hammel provide some interesting data showing the extent to which investment in inner‐city areas has accelerated in recent years, paralleling changes in financial arrangements and contradicting any notion that degentrification is a continuous, long‐term process. Their data, although short on demographic detail, also implicitly highlight the role of government in pushing the market to respond rationally to economic demand and the continuing danger that gentrification will displace African‐American families.     

GLOBALIZATION'S IMPACT ON STATE-LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT POLICY

The growing exposure of the U.S. economy to international competition, popularly termed globalization, over the past two decades has brought some momentous changes affecting the American economy, society, and life styles. Not surprisingly, these changes have been reflected in growing political turbulence and shifts in policy paradigms as well. This symposium explores the effects that globalization has had on economic development policy and practice by state and local governments in the United States. Part I charts and seeks to explain“The Expanding Global Linkages” of state and local governments over the last several decades. Part II on the” Potential for Transformation “then argues that the economic transformations set off by globalization are pushing state and local development policy toward strategies that should overcome some of the problems associated with the previous strategy dubbed “smokestack chasing.” Yet, caution is certainly necessary before accepting such optimistic interpretations. Part III, therefore, presents several analyses suggesting that smokestack chasing “struck back” and that blind reliance on free markets and entrepreneurs hip can be dangerous to a community's social and economic health, indicting the existence of “Pitfalls in a Changing Universe.”