Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Specialized Governance and Complex Service-Delivery: Local Governmental Management of Fiscal and Natural Resources

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

This panel focuses on the proliferation of specialized delivery of public services in metropolitan areas and the impact on the management of natural and fiscal resources. Independent special districts have multiplied across municipal, county and state jurisdictions to provide fire protection, water, social services, transportation, health-care, economic-development and a host of other public services. Fragmentation of both general-purpose and special-district governments has also created a landscape in which there are greater barriers and opportunities for cross-jurisdictional collaboration. Advancing our understanding of special-district formation, impacts on the delivery and demand for public goods, and their dissolution -- the life cycle of the special district -- can provide greater insight into both policy design and management of polycentric governance systems. The four papers address the impact of special-district governance across fiscal, water management and land-use policy arenas, and include the U.S. and Chinese local governance contexts. The proposed panel addresses four key elements within this life cycle of specialized governance and complex service delivery: the impact of fragmentation on regional land-use and development patterns, the impact of regional fragmentation across state lines on fiscal health within municipalities, the conditions under which special districts tasked with delivering complex environmental public goods fail and are dissolved, and common alternatives for how cities respond to environmental externalities via collaborative networks and inter-governmental agreements.

All four papers utilize rigorous methodological approaches examining changes over time, and make use of a wide range of under-valued spatial, financial, network, and demographic data to examine governance performance. Our first paper matches state archival records on special district characteristics with federal spatial data to explore how functionally distinct types of specialized governance influence land-use outcomes in the fast-developing state of Florida. The second paper explores how fragmentation across states influences the fiscal conditions which are a primal focus for U.S. local governments. The third paper combines water districts data from Texas with Safe Drinking Water Act monitoring data obtained from the U.S. Environmental Protection to explore when and why special purpose districts fail. Our fourth paper uses a fragmented context of Guangdong Province, China, to explore how networks of city leaders influence inter-local agreements to overcome environmental policy-related collective-action dilemmas.