Urban Change and Poverty (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Urban Governance: The New Politics of Entrepreneurship
Urban Governance: The New Politics of Entrepreneurship
Pages 348-374
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From page 348... ...
Most fundamentally, the emerging changes in urban governance involve increases in the importance of local political and economic factors and policies. National policies are of less importance in part because the funding (and sometimes the scope)
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From page 349... ...
Increasingly, the national government is reducing its direct policy involvement with local economic growth and job creation. National fiscal, monetary, tax, and defense procurement policies affect local economies but with much less place-specific intent than was the case with sewer grants, urban development action grants, or even community development block grants and grants from the Economic Development Administration.
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From page 350... ...
Most share, for example, the following attributes, which are derived from the service delivery-focused public administration orientation to government: . definition of the "problem" as requiring direct action by pub kc employees, usually with little attention to the potential role of a private individual, firm, or organization; · policy strategies that rely on service provision to achieve the desired ends; ~ program designs based on implementation through highly formalized, functionally specific organizations supported by general tax revenues (i.e., public bureaucracies)
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From page 351... ...
As local governments became more dependent on federal funds, national policies and grants influenced their policy agendas, guided resource allocation, and shaped the structures of government. Cities defined problems as requiring direct action by public employees, emphasized service provision, and created highly formalized, functionally specific organizations.
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From page 352... ...
individual leadership and policy entrepreneurship. The 1965~1980 period was one of continuities in national urban policies and in urban governance because these three factors were coaligned.
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From page 353... ...
These data suggest that fiscal limits on governments mirror the fiscal stress citizens are experiencing; far from being the work of
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From page 354... ...
Since the beginning of industrialization, most jobs were created in central cities, but in the past several years, more jobs have been created in suburban locations than in central cities. Table 3 illustrates this phenomenon with data on job creation in San Francisco, California, and in three adjacent TABLE 2 Growth Rates in Government Receipts as a Percentage of Gross National Product D ecade Growth Rate 1929-1939 1939-1949 1949-1959 1959-1969 1969-1979 1979-1984 55 29 21 18 o o SOURCE: Calculated from Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (1987:Table 3)
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From page 355... ...
suburban counties during December 1980-December 1984. As can be seen, San Francisco was stagnant overall, whereas Contra Costa and Sonoma Counties had high rates of job creation and San Mateo, a more mature economy that had grown rapidly in the past, grew modestly.
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From page 356... ...
, these strategies were shaped by "the composition of the political coalitions they depend on for support and the structure of political organizations and institutions in their cities. Policy entrepreneurs who played leadership roles in the reduction of fiscal strain chose adaptive mechanisms and strategies that were influenced by their ideologies, that is to say, their policy theories.
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From page 357... ...
Thus, attention must be paid not just to rational policy choice but also to internal political relationships, ideologies, and interests, all of which are important in shaping the choices of each interest group and, through their interaction, the public policies that ultimately develop. In this process of mobilizing interests and melding disparate elements into effective political forces, individual policy entrepreneurs play important leadership roles.
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From page 358... ...
These political changes were facilitated by the Aggressive pluralism" and larger societal trends in the 1965-1980 period and are now being institutionalized in ways that interact with the other changes taking place in urban governance. Acreages In the N,~n~ber of Black and Hispanic Elected Officials The number of black and Hispanic municipal officials has continued to grow in the 1980s as it did in the 1970s.
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From page 359... ...
When promoting economic development, they included strong requirements for minority contracting ant} employment. Black and Hispanic elected officials make strong efforts to gain the support of major business interests, as can be seen in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, and Philadelphia.
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From page 360... ...
In many cities, white female council members are more supportive of minority concerns than are white men (Browning et al., 1984~. The increase in the number of female elected officials, like the increases in minorities, suggests the emergence of new coalitions at the local level that might approach the issues of the 1980s differently than would be the case in the absence of these new leaders.
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From page 361... ...
The change from at-large to district elections has also occurred in the West, including municipalities such an Long Beach, Sacramento, San Jose, Stockton, and Oakland, California; and Tacoma, Washington. A study by the International City Management Association (1982:185)
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From page 362... ...
In Fort Worth and Montgomery, local leaders, apparently wanting to avoid racial strife and fearing legal actions, proposed district elections. In other cities, such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and Sacramento, the pressure to change to district elections came from m~le-cIass groups, which in most cases mobilized around neighborhood desires to have more influence on city policy choices.
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From page 363... ...
The growing presence of minorities, especially blacks, and women at the local level two groups that are an important part of the Democratic constituency suggests that this situation is likely to persist even though the local issues and responses by those coalitions are changing. PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS AN ALTERNATIVE POLICY THEORY When most individuals concerned with city policy choices accepted the theory that the urban problem was ineffective service provision and graft and corruption, and that the solution was the delivery of municipal services through functionally specific professionalized public bureaucracies supporter!
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State intergovernmental grants increased in importance as revenue sources for counties and cities, however. Although taxes and grants from the national government declined, current charges and utility revenue increased in importance as revenue sources for every type of government.
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Of all governments. Intergovernmental transfers from states have increased modestly as a percentage of county and city revenues, but this increase has occurred mostly because of reduced total revenues available to those local governments and not because of the increased largess of states.
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From page 366... ...
; by the same measure, the states are less generous with cities, a fiscal area in which state grants increased only 85.2 percent. Strong evidence of the decline in the fiscal importance of intergovernmental grants from the national government to cities is clear in Table 4.
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From page 367... ...
The major associations concerned with urban management, land development, and economic development, including the Urban Land Institute, the National League of Cities, the Public Securities Association, the International City Management Association, and the Municipal Finance Officers' Association, have all sponsored program sessions, training workshops, and publications concerning public entrepreneurship. To succeed, political leaders must address problems within the constraints and opportunities of their time.
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From page 368... ...
CHALLENGES OF PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP The changes in urban governance and the interplay among interest groups, dominant political theories, and the policy choices examined earlier in this paper all underscore the continued governability of cities. Cities have emerged from the recent period of fiscal limits, recession, and decreases in grants-in-aid with strengthened, not diminished, capacity.
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From page 369... ...
A dominant definition of equity in our society is Treating equal cases alike," a definition easily met by service-delivering public bureaucracies (if you are in this category, you get these services) but often violated in the more particularistic practices of public entrepreneurship (the freeway interchange financed by the developer will not equally improve the traffic circulation of all parts of an area)
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REFERENCES Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 1980 In Brief: The Federal Role in the Federal S~ten~ 17~c Dynamics of Growth. Washington, D.C.: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Rela tions.
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:573-640. Browning, Rufus P., Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H
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From page 372... ...
National Association of Latino Elected Officials 1986 Thc National Roster of Hispanic Elected Officials. Washington, D.C.: National Association of Latino Elected Officials.
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Winkler, eds., California Policy Choicer, vol.
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