Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The issues of fragmentation pose significant challenges to environmental governance at the local level. Horizontal collective action problems present severe challenges to local governments as cities located in the same region find it difficult to achieve efficient policy or governance outcomes, when their decisions spill across the geographic boundaries (Feiock and Scholz 2010). One approach adopted by cities to mitigate horizontal fragmentation is by entering into interlocal agreement (ILA).

However, none of the current research examines the impact that the career path of local managers has on the formation of environmental ILAs. As argued by Thurmaier and Wood (2002), it’s very difficult to distinguish an organization’s brokerage role from crucial individuals who might be key stakeholders in promoting the interactions among organizations. To address this challenge, we shift the focus on professional social networks of public managers to public administrators’ career path network, by exploring how the career path network of city managers affects the formation of ILAs among cities, controlling for traditional factors driving interlocal cooperation. We propose an ANC model to provide a theoretical explanation for how the career trajectories of city managers, as a social network, affect the formation of ILAs among local jurisdictions.

Specifically, this study investigates how the leadership transfer network of city managers affect the formation of interlocal agreements on environmental issues in the 400 cities in Florida. We propose two hypotheses: a direct agent network hypothesis and an indirect agent network hypothesis. In the Direct Agent Network Hypothesis (H₁), we hypothesize that two cities (X and Y) are likely to establish more interlocal environmental agreements, when a city manager transferred from X to Y, and that the city manager is in office in Y during Year_t to Year_t+n. In the Indirect Agent Network Hypothesis (H2), we hypothesize that two cities (X and Z) are more likely to establish more interlocal environmental agreements, when a city manager transferred from X to Y, then from Y to Z, and that the city manager is in office in Z during Year_t to Year_t+n.

With a dyadic panel data set of 400 cities in Florida 2005 to 2010, we examine the impact of leadership transfer network on the adoption of ILAs with dyadic panel Poisson model. The data are from a unique data set compiled by the author and manually coded from media sources. Preliminary results support both the effects of direct agent network and indirect agent network on the formation of interlocal agreement. The results of the study go beyond the study context, and have theoretical methodological implications for studying interlocal agreement and collaborative governance in the U.S. and in other contexts.