Digaetano Strom

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1177/1078087402238806 URBANGOVERNANCE DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003
ARTICLE
COMPARATIVE URBAN GOVERNANCE An Integrated Approach

ALAN DIGAETANO
Baruch CollegeCUNY
ELIZABETH STROM
Rutgers UniversityNewark
This article develops an integrated framework for comparing urban governance cross nationally. Joining together structural, cultural, and rational actor approaches to cross-national comparison, it explains the institutional milieux of urban governance in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Comparison of public-private partnership arrangements in cities of these four countries is used to demonstrate the utility of this integrated framework.
Not long ago, a number of prominent scholars engaged in the study of crossnational politics took stock of the state of comparative political analysis (see Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997). From this exercise in introspection and debate, two general conclusions were drawn. The first identified the dominant and competing schools of thought that have emerged in the study of comparative politics over the past 30 yearsrational choice, cultural, and structural. The second argued that some integration of the three approaches might prove fruitful for advancing the study of comparing politics. Not surprisingly, the comparative study of urban politics has divided along lines similar to the comparative research of countries and regions. Some urbanists compare structural contexts to explain patterns of urban politics across nations (see Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock 1997). For others, political culture explicates the differences and similarities in cross-national comparisons of urban politics (see Barnekov, Boyle, and Rich 1989). And still others emphasize rational actors as the principal explanatory agent of
AUTHORS NOTE: We are indebted to Thomas Halper and the anonymous UAR referees for their critical and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 3, January 2003 356-395 DOI: 10.1177/1078087402238806 2003 Sage Publications
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urban politics (see, for example, Stone 1995). Missing from comparative of analysis of urban politics, however, has been a self-conscious effort to grapple with the epistemological problems of comparative urban research. This article proposes to develop an integrated framework for comparing urban governance cross nationally. In so doing, we seek to integrate the three major schools of thought in the study of comparative politicsrational actor, cultural, and structuralinto a single mode of analysis. The primary focus of this work will be urban governance in North America and Western Europe. Our argument is presented in four parts. The first part of the article reviews the structural, cultural, and rational actor approaches to the study of urban governance. The second sets out the main components of our integrated analytical method. The third section applies this method to the study of publicprivate partnerships in four countries. The concluding portion of the article assesses the utility of an integrated analytical framework for the study of comparative urban governance.
THREE APPROACHES TO COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF URBAN GOVERNANCE

STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO URBAN GOVERNANCE
Structural approaches to comparative analysis owe their origins largely to Marxian and Weberian political thought, which emphasize the importance of social and economic relations in shaping political processes and policies (see, for example, Moore 1966; Skocpol 1973). According to Lichbach (1997, 248), structural analysis is concerned with historically rooted and materially based processes of distribution, conflict, power, and domination, thought to drive social order and social change. Thus, as Katznelson (1997, 83) claims, scholars who adopt the structural approach assume that the most significant processes shaping human identities, interests, and interaction are such large-scale features of modernity as capitalist development, market rationality, state-building, secularization, political and scientific revolution, and the acceleration of instruments for the communication and diffusion of ideas. The dominant structural perspective in the study of comparative urban politics is political economy. Premised on the notion that urban politics is a product of the division of labor between state and market in city affairs, urban political economy attempts to explain how interaction of government power and private resources constrain or condition urban political decision making (see Smith 1984; Gottdiener and Feagin 1988). Comparative urban political
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economy, by extension, attempts to explain how this structural divide shapes the contours of urban governance across countries. Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock (1997, 349), for example, developed a political economy framework for comparing urban regimes by examining the bargaining context of cities. Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock define regimes as governmental agents that function to bargain out the terms of cooperation between the public and private sector in a liberal-democratic political economy. Based on the political-economic criteria of market position (favorable, unfavorable) and intergovernmental system (integrated, dispersed), Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock distinguish four bargaining contexts and two urban regimes associated with each: dirigist (planner, distributor), dependent private (vendor, radical), dependent public (grantsman, clientelist), and mercantile (commercial, free enterprise). Sellers (2002) furnishes an even more parsimonious structural analysis, narrowing his explanation of the differences in urban governance among nations to differences in intergovernmental systems. Comparing Madison, Wisconsin, and Mnster, Germany, Sellers found that despite the presence of a more conservative governing coalition in Mnster, the German citys policy agenda was more progressive than the left-leaning regime in Madison. Sellers attributes this apparent paradox to the more organized intergovernmental system Germany, which requires local governments to be more interventionist in terms of environmental and social policy. The market-oriented governing system in the United States, on the other hand, forced Madisons more progressive governing alliance to accommodate business and real estate interests by pursuing a more progrowth policy agenda. Regulation theory provides a more comprehensive, Marxian approach to structural analysis of urban governance. Regulation theoryas conceived by its originator, Aglietta (1979), positing a crisis-prone world capitalist systemseeks to explain how social, cultural, and political modes of regulation maintain stability. Fordism prevailed from the 1930s to what he characterized as the international economic crisis of 1974 and took the form of standardized systems of mass production and distribution of goods and services, all managed through a mode of regulation based on the Keynesian welfare states fiscal and social consumption policies. Regulationists argue that since the early 1970s, there has been a systematic dismantling of the Fordist mode of regulation. The political consequence of these structural changes in the world economy has been the triumph of neoliberalism (read conservatism in American terms) in advanced capitalist nations. In practical terms, this has meant the formation of the Schumpetarian workfare state, which emphasizes the promotion of innovation in production and labor market flexibility, on one hand, and state restructuring that transfers political and administrative
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decision making upward to supranational organizations (e.g., European Union, NAFTA, World Bank, IMF) and downward to urban and regional governing systems (Brenner 1999; MacLeod and Goodwin 1999; Jessop 1997, Painter 1995), on the other. The central problem with a strictly structural analysis of urban governance is its inability to account fully for variation among nations and cities. For the bargaining context model developed by Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock (1997), variation in governing patterns is produced by differences in specifics structural matrix of a citys political economy. According to DiGaetano and Klemanski (1999), however, some cities with similar bargaining contexts developed different modes of governance. Similarly, Sellerss (2002) intergovernmental explanation cannot account for difference among cities within a single nation. Urban regulation theorists (Jessop, Peck, and Tickell 1999; Painter and Goodwin 2000), in turn, concentrate on general shifts in the modes of regulation, such as the rise of neoliberalism and the consequent shift to entrepreneurialism in urban governance. However, a number of studies have shown that some cities have adopted decidedly nonentrepreneurial modes of governance (see DeLeon 1992; DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999; Leo 1998, Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock 1997). These problems signal the danger of overreliance on a political economy perspective in comparing modes of urban governance. Although cross-national differences in urban political economy certainly effect differences in governing patterns, the specific modes of governance that emerge are in fact products of a far more complicated set of influences and processes.
CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN GOVERNANCE
A second theoretical perspective posits culture as the primary explanatory factor in comparing the politics of different nations. Cultural analysis of political systems derives from anthropological studies of basic values, symbols, and beliefs that provide a system of meaning that people use to manage their daily worlds, large and small; . . . culture is the basis of social and political identity that affects how people line up and how they act on a wide range of matters (Ross 1997, 42). Cultural analysis of urban politics has gained momentum recently (see Ferman 1996, Ramsey 1996) and has been applied in a number of comparative studies (see, for example, Barnekov, Boyle, and Rich 1989; Clark 2000). Some of these cultural theorists posit a convergence thesis, which argues that the forces of globalization have wrought a new political culture worldwide (Clark 2000). The old political culture of clientelism and class politics have given way to a new politics of greater reliance on private sector solutions to urban governance, narrowing of the left-
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right ideological divide, growing salience of social issues (relative to economic ones), and growing skepticism toward the welfare state (Clark 2000). In practical terms, the new political culture implies a weaker role for at least traditional political parties, unions, and organized groups and a stronger role for citizens, the media, and outside experts who can encourage policy innovations (Clark 2000, 24). In policy terms, this has meant that urban policy makers have adopted agendas that emphasize fiscal austerity, social tolerance, and amenity provision and protection. Other proponents of cultural analysis stress the divergence in national and local cultures (see Ferman 1996; Ramsey 1996). According to Ramsey (1996), culture is linked to governance by ideological constructions through which participants in the political process interpret local events. Such ideological orientations also provide the core values upon which policy decisions are made. But local political cultures are composed of competing narratives and discourses about the proper roles and purposes of public policy and authority so that the outcome of this competition is important because government action is shaped by the story that gains the ascendancy (p. 96). For Ramsey, privatism has generally prevailed in American city politics, in which diverse local voices are conventionally devalued and displaced by a generalized and homogenized interpretation that elevates the common currency of jobs, revenue, and trade as the measures of local success (pp. 96-97). Nonetheless, instances can be found, for example in so-called progressive cities (see Clavel 1986; DeLeon 1992), where more communitarian constructions displace or devalue privatism, at least for a time. The utility of the comparative cultural analysis lies in its explanation of how historically and socially embedded systems of values enable certain modes of governance to persist in the face of structural change. But in this strength also lies its weakness; it explains persistence much better than change. Cultural traditions tend to preserve existing arrangements and therefore resist changes in political rules, norms, and practices (see Ferman 1996; Ramsey 1996). Fundamental changes in urban governance, therefore, can only be adequately explained by taking into account changes in the urban political-economic context and/or the changing political calculus of and actions taken by urban leaders (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999).
RATIONAL ACTORS AND URBAN GOVERNANCE
The rational actor model, predicated on micro-economic theory, focuses on the role of self-interest in collective action (Downs 1957; Riker and Ordeshook 1973). According to Levy (1997, 23), it examines rational and strategic individuals who make choices within constraints to obtain their
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desired ends, whose decisions rest on their assessment of the probable action of others. One variant of rational actor analysis, rational or public choice, has been a persistent, if not dominant, explanation of urban governance since Tiebouts (1956) seminal work on public goods (see also Basolo 2000; Dowding et al. 1999; Peterson 1981). Familiar analysis of cost-benefit calculations operates at the core of rational choice theories of politics, such as game theory, where political actors make decisions based on calculations of self-interest. Rational choice theory, however, has only rarely been applied to the study of crossnational comparative urban politics (Gurr and King 1987) and, even then, with significant caveats about how differences in institutional settings shape the self-interested actions of political actors. Herein lies the problem with rational choice as a basis for explaining urban governance in comparative perspective. The rules of the game vary, often dramatically, from country to country and city to city, and purely rational choice explanations accept these differences as given rather than explaining how it is that they came to differ (Dowding et al. 1999). Another rational actor model, regime theory, has gained wide recognition among students of comparative urban governance (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1993; Harding 1994; Levine 1994; John and Cole 1998). Crossnational research of urban regimes has drawn heavily on the work of Clarence Stone (1989, 1993), who conceives regimes as the informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together in order to be able to make and carry out governing decisions (Stone 1989, 6). At its core, then, regime theory is about coalition building, in which governing elites construct and maintain regimes by distributing selective incentives to regime partners, which, in turn, result in cooperation around efforts to accomplish relatively manageable tasks, taking advantage of what Stone (1989, 193) calls small opportunities. A successful regime, Stone (2001) notes in more recent work, must also have the capacity to define issues in ways likely to mobilize disparate constituencies around a common purpose. The use of regime theory to explain urban governance, however, has not been without its critics. Most notably, comparative urban scholars have wondered whether a regime approach has much bearing outside the United States; many Western European nations possess strong state traditions, which run counter to regime theorys claim that government officials, given the limited authority of the state, must seek alliances with business or other interests with institutional resources (Harding 1997). Others have found regime and other rational choice approaches wanting, even in the U.S. case, for their emphasis on individual agency and their failure to account for the impact of state structures (Goodwin and Painter 1997). What is more, Stone
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(2001, p. 31) tellingly concedes the limited utility of regime analysis for explaining governing patterns outside the United States, with its fragmented system of local government and weak state tradition.
INTEGRATING PERSPECTIVES ON COMPARATIVE URBAN GOVERNANCE A number of scholars have sought to compensate for shortcomings inhering in a reliance on a single level of analysis to explain patterns of urban governance cross nationally. Some have constructed amalgams of structural and rational actor approaches (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999; John and Cole 1998). Others have integrated structural and cultural perspectives (see John and Cole 2000; Stoker and Mossberger 1994). It is our contention that, like the single-level explanations discussed above, two-level approaches also fall short because even omitting one level of analysis, whether it be the structural context, culture, or rational calculation, attenuates the explanatory power of comparative analysis. Each level of analysis has explanatory value, and each generates a different set of data. Structure sets the parameters of urban governance: Market forces and economic structures; national, regional, and international governing arrangements; and population migrations and demographic structures all establish the context of a citys politics. But explaining differences among otherwise structurally similarly situated cities requires an appreciation of cultural factors, which may vary even from city to city. And explaining change within cities requires an understanding of agency, how and why individuals act as they do, and what institutional and policy consequences follow from their actions. Therefore, it is our intention to incorporate all three levels into a single conceptual framework for comparative analysis, one that captures the dynamic relationships among the three levels. Incorporation of all three levels of analysis requires a point of integration. In the study of comparative urban governance, we argue, political institutions provide the logical analytical focal point. Of late, political scientists have gained a new appreciation of the importance of institutions and their role in shaping public policy. New institutionalists have shown that institutions are not merely formal governmental structures but are dynamic, historically embedded entities that sustain and disseminate systems of beliefs and practices (Lowndes 1996; Immergut 1998). Although institutions have often been the object of urban political analysis, only rarely have they been the focus of cross-national comparisons of urban governance (see, for example, Pierre 1999). Political institutions, for the purposes of this article, are the
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organizational means by which collective decisions are made and carried out. These include political parties, interest groups, governing bodies and agencies, and more recently partnership arrangements that give organization and definition to the political process. These political organizations, however, do not function as independent institutional bases but are situated in a complex set of relations that we call the institutional milieu. It is our contention that the institutional milieu of urban governance is the political domain in which the structural context of economic and state structuring and restructuring, political culture, and the political actors intersect in the process of urban governance. Thus, by tracking institutional longevity and change, we can further our understanding of the varying effects of the structural context, culture, and agency on the process of urban governance. This portion of the article develops our integrated framework, using comparisons of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany to specify the role of each of the analytical elements (structural context, political culture, and political actors) in explaining the institutional milieu of urban governance.
THE INSTITUTIONAL MILIEU OF URBAN GOVERNANCE Institutional milieux are the complexes of formal and informal political and governmental arrangements that mediate interactions among the structural context, political culture, and political actors. Formal institutional arrangements, referred to here as institutional bases, include the governmental bodies and agencies, political parties, interest group organizations, and partnerships that give visible form to urban governance through rules and organization. Modes of governance are the informal arrangements that define the governing relationships among and within formal institutions implicated in urban politics (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999; Pierre 1999).
INSTITUTIONAL BASES
Local governing institutions and systems vary considerably among the four countries. In the United States, local government is highly fragmented and assumes a variety of forms, including mayor-council, city manager, and commission. County and municipal governments serve as general-purpose governments, but single-purpose (e.g., school, water, transit) districts also perform particular functions. Local governing systems in the United Kingdom center on city or county councils that divide authority between elected members and professional officers. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the
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central government created quasi-governmental organizations (quangos) (e.g., urban development corporations and training and enterprise councils) to perform particular functions previously under the jurisdiction of local authorities. Recent reforms under Tony Blairs Labour government have forced local authorities to abandon a long-standing committee system and adopt either cabinet or mayor-council forms of government (Hambleton 2000). Most have opted for the more familiar cabinet-style government, but some have adopted mayor-council forms of government (Sherman 2002). French local governing systems are multitiered, with communes serving as the fundamental unit. Commune governments employ mayor-council systems, with mayors dominating local politics. Germanys constitution guarantees municipal governments the right of local self-administration. As in the United States, there is no uniform local governing model in Germanysome cities directly elect their mayors; in others more parliamentary forms prevailbut all municipal governments feature a popularly elected council responsible for legislative decisions, an executive (who may be popularly elected or may be chosen by the council), and a professional administration (Gunlicks 1986). Political parties are generally weaker and less ideological in American urban politics than in Britain, France, or Germany, and in some cities (e.g., Boston, Detroit, Newark), nonpartisan elections obviate partisan mobilization in local election campaigns. Weaker party systems, in turn, have meant that organized interests and even political movements have played a more significant role in urban politics than in some of the other countries. Parties in British local government are quite strong, with well-developed grassroots organizations and party control of local councils. Interest groups have only recently gained a significant role in British local governance, with business and community sector organizations sought out as partners in regeneration policy making as required by central government grant programs. As in the United Kingdom, parties dominate French urban electoral and governing institutions, and interest groups have remained fairly weak. Also, because French electoral law allows multiple office holding, mayors and other local officials often serve in parliament. This creates additional institutional channels of influence and interdependence between national and local political systems (Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock 1997; Reigner 2001). Germans have long maintained that local government was, and should be, apolitical, an ideal that is seldom met in practice. In smaller towns, nonpartisan-voter groups held a substantial proportion of council seats through the 1970s (and they continue to be important in the villages of southern Germany), but their numbers have steadily diminished as the major national parties have gained ground. In the larger cities, national political parties have long dominated,
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and ties between party leaders at all levels of government create informal sources of influence that supplement the official channels of intergovernmental relations (Gunlicks 1986; Holtmann 1998).
MODES OF GOVERNANCE
Political systems are not just the sum of their formal institutional structures, however. Political institutions in each city are linked together by informal arrangements we call modes of governance (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Comparing urban modes of governance requires distinguishing those informal political relationships that determine how cities are governed (DiGaetano and Lawless 1999; Pierre 1999).1 First, governing relations are the modes of interaction between government officials and private sector (economic or community) interests. Second, governing logic is the manner or method by which political decisions are made. Third, the key decision makers may include various combinations of politicians, bureaucrats, and agents of various civic (economic or community) interests. Finally, the political objectives can be either material (selective tangible benefits), purposive (nonselective tangible benefits), or symbolic (nontangible benefits). Based on these criteria, we identify five modes of urban governance: clientelist, corporatist, managerial, pluralist, and populist. Table 1 identifies the defining characteristics of the five modes of governance. Clientelistic modes of governance form around personalized and particularistic exchange relationships between politicians and favored interests or clients (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984). The governing logic is one based on pragmatic exchange, whose primary purpose is material, that is, to provide selective benefits for the politicians and constituents involved, typified by the classic American party machine (DiGaetano 1988). Urban politicians of all political stripes, particularly in Northeastern U.S. cities, continue to broker political coalitions by maintaining systems of political patronage that confer favors on particular interests in return for political support. Corporatist modes of governance develop programmatic rather than pragmatic public-private governing relations, in which modes of interaction between governmental and civic elites are based on negotiation and compromise (Schmitter 1977). The corporatist governing logic predisposes government and private sector elites to seek a consensus on governing tasks and tends to lead to the formation of exclusionary ruling coalitions of powerful economic and/or community interests. The progrowth alignments of business elites and big-city mayors bent on revitalization of Americas downtowns in the post war exemplify urban corporatism (Levine 1989); the round
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TABLE 1:
Modes of Urban Governance Clientelistic Corporatist Managerial Pluralist Populist
Governing relations
Particularistic, Exclusionary personalized, negotiation exchange
Governing logic Key decision makers
Reciprocity
Consensus building Politicians and powerful civic leaders Purposive
Politicians and clients
Political Material objectives
Brokering or Inclusionary Formal, negotiation bureaucratic, mediating among or competing contractual interests Mobilization Authoritative Conflict of popular managedecision support ment making Politicians Politicians Politicians and and and civil community organized servants movement interests leaders Material Purposive Symbolic
tables convened in the 1980s and 1990s to confront economic decline in German cities offer an alternative example (Heinz 1998). Managerial modes of governance are based on formal, bureaucratic, or contractual relations between government officials and private sector interests (Alford and Friedland 1985; Pierre 1999). Authoritative decisions by government officials, rather than pragmatism or consensus building, imbue the governing logic of a managerial regime. Like corporatism, managerialism is purposive in its political orientation, often emphasizing concerns about the effectiveness or efficiency of government policy and programs. Elements of the managerial mode of governance can be seen in all four countries. In French cities, for example, politicians and civil servants have increasingly turned to the practice of contracting out certain responsibilities to private firms to achieve more cost-effective delivery of municipal services (see Michel 1998; Ngrier 1999). Pluralist modes of governance are characterized by a high degree of competition among contending interests. In pluralist modes of governance, government serves as a broker or arena for rival private interests (see Dahl 1961; Judge 1995). Given the tensions that arise out of political rivalry, the chief concern in pluralist regimes is conflict management; the willingness to bargain becomes a highly valued political style in the local political culture. The key actors are the constellations of politicians and private interests that form competing blocs or alliances in the contest to set a citys policy agenda for material reasons. The persistence of pluralist modes of governance in a
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number of American cities is well documented (DeLeon 1992; Savitch and Thomas 1991). Populist modes of governance emerge where politicians are inclined to resort to grassroots mobilization as a way of setting and implementing policy agendas. The governing logic is democratic inclusion, in which individuals and groups are encouraged to expand their participation in the governing process so that decision making can take advantage of a citys social intelligence (Elkin 1987). The key players in populist modes of governance are politicians and community activists who seek to establish institutional mechanisms for enlarging the purview of popular control in urban governance. The political orientation of populist modes of governance thus is primarily symbolic, as the principal purpose is to infuse the governing process with greater attention to democratic procedures and practices. Populist traditions exist in several American cities, including Boston, Cleveland, and San Francisco (DeLeon 1992; Swanstrom 1985). These five modes of governance, of course, are ideal types (see Weber 1962) and rarely if ever exist in pure forms. However, clientelism, corporatism, managerialism, pluralism, or populism may at any given time prevail in urban governance, although hybrid forms such as a corporatist/clientelist mode of governance may also emerge (see DiGaetano and Lawless 1999). Moreover, we will argue, some structural contexts and political cultures of nations appear to furnish more receptive environments for some modes of governance than others. Nonetheless, modes of governance can become institutionally embedded and thus resistant to even dramatic social, economic, and political restructuring.
THE STRUCTURAL CONTEXT OF URBAN GOVERNANCE: GLOBALIZATION AND STATE DEVOLUTION
Globalization and state devolution establish the contemporary context of urban governance cross nationally.2 Economic globalization has made cities more vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the international economy, compelling them to compete vigorously for infusions of business investment by offering various sorts of subsidies to firms and development interests (see Kantor, Savitch, and Haddock 1997; Le Gals and Harding 1998). This highly competitive system of cities, however, has developed unevenly, with some cities improving their position in the urban hierarchy and others losing ground. This unevenness in urban economic development, we think, can be analyzed by comparing the nature of urban economic structures. Some cities are still rooted in the old economy of heavy industry and distribution of goods. Cities like Detroit (automobile production), Liverpool (port), and
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Essen (steel production) have remained tied to the old economy in significant ways and therefore lag behind in the competition for business investment and middle-class residents. Other cities, in turn, have adjusted to a new economy that emphasizes corporate and financial services, high technology, and cultural sectors (e.g., higher education, tourism and entertainment industries). Corporate, financial, and cultural centers such as London, New York, and Paris epitomize new-economy cities and tend to be more advantageously situated to lure mobile capital and highly skilled workers. It should be noted that the old- versus new-economy distinction is neither fixed nor mutually exclusive. That is, most large cities are seeking to restructure in ways that broaden their bases of new-economy firms, and there have been some notable advances in some such as Chicago, Birmingham (England), Hamburg, and Lille. Therefore, most cities are undergoing economic change toward neweconomy structures but with varying degrees of success. Those cities with substantial sectors of both new- and old-economy industries are considered to possess mixed economic structures. In sum, where new-economy industries dominate, cities have achieved a competitive edge; cities with mixed economies are competitive but saddled with some persistent economic disadvantages; old-economy cities endure the most severe disadvantages in the competition for business investment. State restructuring is also the object of structural analysis. A number of regulation theorists, for instance, claim that the rescaling of state structures to international, regional, and local levels has occurred because the nationcentered political economy that emerged in the fifteenth century has given way to the forces of globalization. North American and European states have adjusted to the pressures of globalized systems of capital accumulation by forging new modes of regulation that operate at the supranational level, like the multinational market systems created by the European Union and NAFTA. The European Union, in particular, has affected urban governance in its member states, encouraging cities to tackle social and economic problems through a wide variety of grant programs. A second and perhaps more significant trend in state restructuring has been the transfer of administrative authority and functional responsibility from higher to lower levels of government (Brenner 1999, 2000; Macleod and Goodwin 1999; Taylor 1994). This process of devolution, however, assumes various forms both within and across national borders. Indeed, understanding the nature (regional or local) and extent (greater or lesser central government control and support) of devolution is essential to comparing changes in the institutional milieux of urban governance. Intergovernmental systems, for example, can be centralized, as in pre-1981 France, where
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national government coordination and funding of local governance was substantial. Partial devolution, in turn, entails the transfer of some functional responsibilities to the regional and/or local levels, but central governments retain the means to determine the policy agendas of regional and local governing authorities through fiscal and programmatic means. For example, in Britain, Tony Blairs Labour government devolved functions to regions (Scotland and Wales and English regional development agencies) but has not expanded the purview of local authorities (Hambleton 2000). Indeed, considerable central government fiscal and statutory limits remain in place for English local authorities under Britains unitary system of government. In highly devolved intergovernmental systems, the locus of authority and responsibility for urban governance sits at the local level of government. In the United States, for example, federal block grant programs and federal retrenchment (de facto devolution) have meant that managing local affairs and raising revenues have become the primary responsibility of local governments (see Eisinger 1998; Kincaid 1999). In France, decentralization reforms of the early 1980s transferred most local governing authority and responsibility to communes but also established some specific functions for departments and regional assemblies (Michel 1998; Ngrier 1999). The German constitutional system envisions states as sovereign entities and municipalities as selfgoverning units, suggesting a degree of devolution comparable to that of the U.S. system. In practice, however, centrally organized political parties and interest groups and a widely shared preference for uniformity in key policy areas has resulted in a more centralized system. Indeed, since the 1980s, German cities have had more control over and responsibility for their economic development programs than previously, a decentralization trend somewhat counterbalanced by the large, post-1990 federal intervention into struggling East German cities. The effects of globalization and state devolution on the institutional milieux of urban governance have been marked and varied. Shifts from old to new economic structures have worked to erode some institutional bases and spawn others. For example, the institutional bases of trade unions based in old-economy sectors, such as manufacturing and transport, have narrowed, and their role in urban governance has subsequently attenuated, particularly in Britain and the United States. On the other hand, public sector unions, particularly in the United States and Germany, have emerged as powerful forces in urban politics. Globalization has also altered the institutional terrain of the business community. New-economy restructuring has strengthened the role of professional and financial service firms in local politics, as downtown business districts, with their concentrations of business services and cultural
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amenities, become magnets for tourism and investment (see DiGaetano and Lawless 1999; Quilley 2000; Peck and Tickell 1995; Ward 1997). Globalization and state devolution have also affected modes of urban governance. In Western Europe and the United States, cities have increasingly adopted corporatist modes of governance (Harding 1997). In Britain, the shift from managerialism to corporatism has largely resulted from state restructuring, in which central government quangos and grants have required business sector participation in the governing process. In the United States, in turn, the continued development of corporatist modes of urban governance reflects the dual conditions of federal withdrawal and an increasingly competitive urban economy. Local political leaders, as a result, have become even more dependent on business cooperation to improve their cities standing in the urban hierarchy. Economic restructuring has also given rise to corporatist arrangements in German cities, as traditional bureaucratic approaches have proven too rigid to respond to rapid change. Devolution in France significantly altered relations among national, regional, and local government officials, with the latter more often seeking alliances with business leaders to formulate and carry out urban economic development policy decisions.
CULTURE AND URBAN GOVERNANCE
Culture is the system of values, symbols, and beliefs that give meaning to social and political organization and action. Politically, North American and Western European countries share democratic traditions but can be differentiated on the basis of national and local perceptions of the role of the state. In countries with strong state traditions, such as France and Germany, the government plays an expansive role in regulating society. In countries with traditions of privatism, such as the United States, government intervention in social and economic problems has been more circumspect and limited. Views of the state in Britain lie somewhere between the strong state traditions of France and Germany and the weak state tradition in the United States. The domain of the British state greatly expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century but was scaled back considerably during the last Conservative government (1979-1997) through modification or privatization of state functions and sustained ideological attack. Culture functions to imbue local political and governing institutions and practices with particular meaning and rationality for political actors. For example, in France and Germany, where strong state traditions persist, state restructuring has not meant a more limited role for local governing institutions (Ngrier 1999; Wollmann 2001). In Britain, where belief in a strong state is less ubiquitous, the aggressive neoliberalism of the Thatcher and
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Major governments in the 1980s and 1990s led to a considerable reduction in the power and scope of British local authorities, transferring authority to quangos and privatizing some functions. Although the current Labour government has halted the process of reducing local government authority and functions, it has shown no signs of returning local authorities to their former levels of governing capacity. Instead, the Blair government is considering the creation of elected regional assemblies that will perhaps further diminish the role of local authorities in England. The prevalence of privatism in the United States has generally limited the role of government in managing the process of urban development, allowing market forces freer rein in shaping the social, economic, and spatial contours of cities (Barnekov, Boyle, and Rich 1989; Kleinberg 1995). For this reason, growth coalitions have often dominated local development politics (Logan and Molotch 1987; Logan, Whaley, and Crowder 1997).
POLITICAL ACTORS AND URBAN GOVERNANCE
Political actors attempt to influence government decision making in ways that benefit themselves and the interests that they represent. Their success, however, usually depends on their ability to forge alliances with actors of different institutional bases of support because such coalitions draw on broader ranges of political resources to accomplish governing tasks (Stone 1989, 1993). These governing coalitions, then, are the means by which urban political actors seek to define, shape, and implement policy agendas (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Because governing coalitions organize around particular policy agendas, who governs becomes a crucial question (Dahl 1961). For example, alliances of politicians, agency officials, and business leaders or development interests generally form around policy agendas of economic development and urban revitalization, whereas coalitions of government officials and community activists, in turn, unite around neighborhood regeneration or social service policy agendas. Coalition formation is always contingent, dependent in part on the presence of leaders who can seize opportunities and choose winning strategies (Ferman 1985; Stone 1995). Political entrepreneurs are those who are able to forge effective coalitions, assembling previously dormant or marginal groups into alliances that may tip the balance of power, dismantling existing coalitions and forming new ones (Mollenkopf 1983). The rational calculations of coalition formation, moreover, do not occur in a vacuum. The processes of coalition formation and reformation are subject
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to limits set by the structural and cultural context. The structural context establishes the parameters of rationally calculated coalition building in several ways. Economic and state restructuring usually conduce to a reallocation of political and other resources in urban politics. Such reordering has often occasioned realignments in alliance formations. According to some analysts, for example, federal retrenchment in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s produced more entrepreneurial forms of leadership in American cities because mayors and other city leaders could no longer depend on federal programs to finance local social and economic revitalization efforts (Eisinger 1998; Clarke and Gaile 1998). Recognizing the shifting political terrain, mayors have sought out business leaders whose resources could make up for losses in federal aid. Similarly, state devolution in France encouraged mayors to form metropolitan alliances because they could no longer rely as heavily on central-local state channels for coordinating large-scale development projects (Michel 1998; Ngrier 1999). Urban political actors thus succeed to the extent that they navigate the obstacles confronting them and take advantage of the opportunities made available by the ever-shifting political-economic landscape (Judd 2000). Political culture also informs the rational calculus of political actors. Indeed, political actors are the carriers of culture, and their understanding of the structural context and institutional milieux is affected by the values and beliefs that they hold. For this reason, for instance, in the crucible of American privatism, political actors have tended to see government as a facilitator of private sector development and have generally eschewed big government solutions in the formulation and implementation of urban policy (Kleinberg 1995; Stone 2001). Furthermore, the weak state tradition in the United States has meant much greater penetration by interest groups in the process of urban governance, with private interests exercising considerable influence over government decision making (Ferman 1996; Ramsey 1996). For this reason, coalitional politics has long been a matter of cross-sectoral alliance formation, in which political actors seek unions with government officials and other interests around common goals and agendas. In contrast, France and Germanys statist traditions have favored intergovernmental and intragovernmental alliances among party politicians and bureaucratic professions within the public sector. Even the role of business organizations, such as chambers of commerce, has been institutionalized within the public sector. Britains partially statist orientation traditionally fostered strong party organizations and limited the role of interest groups but recently, under the ascendence of neoliberalism, opened up opportunities for cross-sectoral coalition building.
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Structural Context
Political Culture
Institutional Milieu Institutional intermediation of structural context and political actors Cultural Intermediation of structural context and institutional milieu
Political Actors
Institutional intermediation of culture and Political Culture actors political
Figure 1:
An Integrated Model of Urban Governance
AN INTEGRATED MODEL FOR COMPARING URBAN GOVERNANCE
Our approach to comparative analysis conceives of urban governance as occurring within a nested set of environmental complexes in which institutions provide the integument. Indeed, as depicted in Figure 1, urban governance, defined here as the process of coordinating political decision making, is construed as a series of intermediations across the structural, cultural, and agency levels of governance. These differing three sets of intermediation are best grasped when considering institutional change because change often lays bare the paths of causality. Three intersecting propositions provide a framework for comparing institutional change in urban governance.
1. The sources of institutional change in urban governance stem most fundamentally from changes in the structural context. In the postindustrial era, such structural change has been framed by globalization and state devolution of administrative and policy-making responsibility. First, globalization (and capitalist development more generally) has produced a spatial pattern of uneven urban economic development based on cities ability to attract new-economy industrial investment. That is, post-
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industrial urban hierarchies are based on the proportion of a citys economy composed of new-economy and old-economy industrial development. A second critical element of globalization is that capital is also highly mobile, which means that the international, national, and regional systems of cities have become highly competitive. The effects of these economic changes on urban institutional milieux have been differential. In the competition for new-economy industrial investment, cities have increasingly adopted new institutional forms of governance, such as partnership arrangements and corporatist modes of governance. Nevertheless, in cities with older industrial economies, parties and managerial forms of governance often remain important elements of the institutional milieu. State restructuring also affects the institutional milieux of urban governance. State devolution of the locus of local governing responsibility has been a general trend in Western Europe and North America over the past two decades or so. If intergovernmental devolution has also been accompanied by withdrawal or reduction of central government financial support, we would expect this to reinforce the trend toward partnership arrangements and corporatist forms of governance. That is, local governments saddled with new responsibilities would need to find new bases of institutional resources, such as the private or nonprofit sector organizations, and new institutional forms to coordinate governing tasks, such as corporatist and partnership arrangements. Highly centralized state structures, in turn, would tend to preserve traditional party systems and managerial modes of governance. Between these two polar extremes, of course, various partially devolved state structures exist and, depending on the specific nature of the partial devolution, will push urban governance more or less toward the formation of partnership-based, corporatist institutional milieux. In short, the increasingly competitive nature of the global economy, combined with the devolutionary direction of state restructuring, has occasioned a structural context that favors partnership institutional bases and corporatist modes of governance in Western Europe and North America. 2. This parsimonious proposition about the effects of changes in the structural context, however, requires significant qualification to explain the wide variation in the development of urban institutional milieux both cross nationally and within particular countries. Political culture, in other words, mediates or filters the effects of economic and political change on the institutional milieux of urban governance. Specifically, where strong statist traditions blunt or dilute the forces of globalization and devolution, the extent of institutional change toward partnerships and corporatist modes of governance will be least. Conversely, privatist political cultures facilitate impacts of globalization and devolution on the institutional milieux by encouraging partnership arrangements based on corporatist modes of governance. The mediating effects of mixed political cultures lie somewhere in between, depending on where a country sits on the continuum between statism and privatism. 3. The roles of political actors in this schema are either as agents or resistors of institutional change. That is, political actors operate within a structural context of economic and political constraints and opportunities. Structural change may greatly affect the sorts of coalitions that political actors construct. The emergence and expansion of a new-economy sector may reorder the complex
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TABLE 2:
Intergovermental and Cultural Political Conditions Privatist Culture Mixed Culture Statist Culture
Centralized intergovernmental system Partially devolved intergovernmental system Devolved intergovernmental system Germany
Pre-1979 Britain
Pre-1981 France
Post-1979 Britain
United States
Post-1981 France,
of institutional bases in ways that shift the locus of political power into the hands of new or different organizational interests, thus engendering local political realignments. Coupled with devolution, these economic changes encourage local politicians to seek new sorts of allies in forming governing coalitions. However, political actors also may seek to resist institutional change. The rational calculations made by political actors, in short, will depend on their institutional bases and cultural orientations. We posit that those actors based in organizations precipitated or shaped by new-economy restructuring and state devolution tend to accommodate institutional change toward partnership formation and corporatist modes of governance. In contrast, political actors from traditional institutional bases, such as trade unions or political parties, and imbued with statist political orientations are more likely to resist the institutional development of partnership arrangements and corporatist modes of governance.
Based on propositions 1 and 2, Table 2 presents a matrix of political factors (state structure and culture) that establish the national political conditions for urban governance in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Different combinations of intergovernmental and cultural settings, it will be argued, furnish different environments for the development of local political institutions and modes of governance. The following comparison of partnership politics is organized around these classifications: partially devolved/mixed culture for Britain, highly devolved/statist culture for France and Germany, and highly devolved/privatist culture for the United States. The roles of economic structure (new, mixed, or old economies) and political actors (resistance or accommodation) are not represented in this matrix because they do not operate at the national level. Their effect on urban governance instead is discerned by a comparison of cities across and within nations.
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COMPARING THE POLITICS OF PARTNERSHIP A comparison of partnership politics in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany will help to illustrate how an integrated analytical framework can improve our understanding of the nature of relationships among structure, culture, and leadership and how they shape and are in turn shaped by the institutional milieu of urban governance. Public-private partnerships are relatively new forms of political institutions, and their emergence has altered the institutional milieux of urban governance in many countries. Public-private partnerships are institutional arrangements that attempt to bridge the structural division of labor between state and market in urban politics. Although specific arrangements vary widely, the basic principle in the formation of partnerships is to bring together government officials and civic leaders (business, community, etc.), first to break down intersectoral barriers of mistrust and misunderstanding and then to formulate and implement local policies that will address the challenges of governing cities. Indeed, where partnerships have become established as institutional bases, we posit, closer intersectoral cooperation has led to a greater reliance on corporatist modes of governance. However, the ability of partnership arrangements to become central to the workings of the institutional milieu of governance has depended upon the specific interactions among the structural context, political culture, and political actors that shape the contours of a citys governing system. The partnerships of greatest interest to urban scholars have been those dedicated to purposes beyond the traditional, service delivery tasks of local governments. That public-private partnerships have emerged as a tool of governance in cities of all four countries suggests a convergence of public policies across local and national borders (Clark 2000; Jessop, Peck, and Tickell 1999; Levine 1994). Understanding the popularity of such partnerships and the growing dominance of a discourse stressing partnerships and competitiveness appears, at first blush, best furthered through a structural analysis. Over the past 20 years, the idea has spread that public-private partnerships provide a means for coping with the pressures of global economic restructuring and the consequent competition among cities that it has fostered. The dispersion of the partnership concept, from its origins in the United States to Western Europe, is in some ways a testament to the sophistication and power of the global communication network that disseminates knowledge and information widely and in greater and greater volume. And indeed, we note that structural conditions throughout North America and Western Europelowering of trade barriers through the creation of new regional trading blocs, expansion of high-speed communication networks, marked improvements in edu-
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cation across the globe, and the shift to a highly skilled, technologically based workforcehave seemed to privilege urban governance forms featuring institutionalized cooperation between public and private sectors. But a closer look reveals that the common rubric partnership obscures real divergence cross nationally among the arrangements so labeled. Structural analysis offers little to help us understand such variation. Rather, cultural analysis can help explain why different partnership forms, with different goals, arise cross nationally. Rational actor analysis, finally, enables us to refine our understanding of the uses if any to which partnerships are put, why some are considered successful and some failures, and why some are sustained and others ephemeral.
UNITED STATES: HIGHLY DEVOLVED PRIVATISM
The postwar structural context of public-private partnership formation in the United States features two basic elements: a highly devolved state structure and dramatic urban economic restructuring. This has meant that American urban partnerships have generally been locally initiated in response to economic pressures. The political tradition of privatism has reinforced this institutional development by making government-business cooperation an acceptable feature of American urban politics. The seedbeds of partnership formation seem to have been those older industrial cities experiencing severe economic decline and inner-city physical decay in postwar America. Marc Levine (1989) demarcates two phases of partnership development in the United States. In the period of emergence, 1943 to 1970, business elites formed committees to develop strategies that addressed the problem of central business revitalization. Business elites in Pittsburgh were the innovators of this form of partnership, founding the Allegheny Conference on Community Development in 1943. Downtown business leaders in Milwaukee, Baltimore, and other cities soon followed suit. The federal government facilitated the proliferation of urban partnerships through the Urban Renewal program, created by the Housing Act of 1949, by stipulating that local development agencies be established for the purpose of formulating and implementing federally funded renewal plans and projects. Adapting to the new federal context, cities like Boston, New Haven, and San Francisco created redevelopment authorities with public powers but governed by boards composed of public officials and businesspersons. Finally, progrowth mayors, like Bostons John Collins, Pittsburghs David Lawrence, and San Franciscos George Christopher, encouraged the creation of these business-led committees and redevelopment authorities and worked closely with them to carry out large-scale renewal programs (see Mollenkopf 1983;
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Sbragia 1989). It should be noted, however, that in some cities, such as Chicago and Jersey City, political clientelism remained firmly entrenched, and corporatist partnership arrangements failed to appear. Instead, some machine boss mayors, such as Chicagos Richard Daley, adapted to the circumstances of urban decline by undertaking massive downtown redevelopment programs but coordinated the effort through the Democratic machine and bureaucratic agencies, not corporatist partnerships (Squires et al. 1987). The second phase of development, 1970 to 1985, featured the proliferation of partnerships. Levine (1989) notes that federal programs, such as the Community Development Block Grant (1974) and Urban Development Action Grant (1977), furnished a plethora of financial inducements to form partnership arrangements around downtown and other economic development programs. Innovative governing coalitions also began to fashion their own subsidy programs, such as tax abatements for business investment, to attract investment to the central business districts. Control of the tax abatement program in Boston, for instance, was given to the quasi-public Boston Redevelopment Authority. Also, under the leadership of Mayor Coleman Young in Detroit, tax-increment finance districts were created, and management of this program was placed in the hands of the newly established Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, a public-private partnership of government officials and downtown business elites that oversaw the operations of the citys quasi-public development authorities (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). The period since the mid-1980s appears to constitute a third stage in American partnership development. Since then, partnership formation has not only proliferated but has also diversified. In the context of state devolution and federal withdrawal, marked by the dramatic reduction in federal aid to cities during the Reagan and Bush administrations (1981-1992), American cities have become far more reliant on their own resources (Eisingner 1998; Kincaid 1999). In this political environment, old-economy cities, such as Detroit and Cleveland, have continued to rely on corporatist partnerships dominated by alliances of government officials and business elites. Some cities prospering from new-economy growth, however, have developed partnerships based on populist modes of governance (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999; Keating 1997). In Boston, rapid downtown development and concomitant dislocation of poor and working-class families by rising housing prices and gentrification occasioned a governing alliance that saw the collapse of the citys long-standing progrowth coalition. These circumstances enabled Bostons well-organized community movement to forge a governing alliance with the neighborhood-oriented mayor, Raymond Flynn (DiGaetano 1999). This social reform alliance altered the citys institutional milieu, creating a
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populist mode of governance that was institutionalized through partnerships between community-based organizations and the Flynn administration, such as planning advisory councils (PACs) (DiGaetano 1997, 1999). A broad alliance of community groups lobbied the Flynn administration to create the PACs as community-based review boards for neighborhood development. The Flynn administration and its successor under Mayor Thomas Menino have allowed PACs to exercise de facto veto power over any development in their neighborhood jurisdictions (see DiGaetano 1997,1999). Similar circumstances produced the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development and Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (see Ferman 1996 and Nickel 1995, respectively).
BRITAIN: PARTIALLY DEVOLVED MIXED CULTURE
In Britain, local councils and political parties constituted the main institutional bases in the milieux of urban governance, which were characterized by managerial modes of governance. With ample authority and resources, leaders from major parties on city councils and professional (nonpartisan) officers managed the delivery of local authority services and undertook, in some cities like Birmingham, Bristol, and Glasgow, large-scale redevelopment of city centers and housing estates in the postwar period (see Webman 1982; Punter 1990; Boyle 1990, respectively). By the 1980s, however, the urban political-economic landscape in Britain had altered considerably. Massive deindustrialization and economic contraction in Scotland and in Englands northern and midland regions (see Spencer et al. 1986; Boyle 1990, Parkinson 1990; Lawless 1990) was sharply contrasted by new-economy growth in the south of England. What is more, partial devolution during the Thatcher era (1979-1989) left local authorities with less discretion and more responsibilities for coping with problems of economic restructuring. That is, the Conservative government revamped Britains local governing system, imposing constraints on local authority planning and spending and introducing marketlike mechanisms of contracting out local authority service delivery systems. Also quangos, in particular urban development corporations and training and enterprise councils, were established in many cities. These quangos operated independently of local authorities and assumed responsibilities, resources, and powers that had previously been lodged in the elected city and county councils. Moreover, the governing boards of urban development corporations and training and enterprise councils were dominated by business executives, who used them as new bases of power in local development politics. As a result, local authorities no longer monopolized local governing authority but now had to work with (or in some cases against) an emerging business
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leadership whose power was founded upon a new institutional milieu of quangocracy. Public-private partnerships, as a consequence, were usually a result of central government policy rather than being homegrown, as in the United States (Harding 1998). Furthermore, in Britains mixed political culture, which was itself being moved closer to the privatism end of the continuum by the successes the Conservative governments neoliberal policies, these local partnership arrangements usually took on corporatist forms. Partial devolution under Blairs Labour government (1997-present) simply reinforced these trends of corporatist partnership formation. The idea of partnership in Britain was clearly transplanted from the United States, but it took on a decidedly British character. In most old-economy cities, like Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, it was embraced in the 1980s as a means to plan and implement economic development activities but only after Labour councils had experimented with New Left approaches to municipal socialism, which eschewed the Labourist traditions and emphasized newer issues such as community development, the environment, and racial and gender equality (see DiGaetano and Lawless 1999; Haughton and While 1999; Quilley 2000; Peck and Tickell 1995). The New Left Labour leaders in Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, however, acceded to the political realities of Thatcherite constraints on local authorities, the new institutional milieu that included quangos, UDCs, and TECs, and an increasingly competitive economy by accommodating corporatist partnership arrangements that focused on city center revitalization. In an extreme case, the more radical Labour administration in Liverpool resisted corporatist arrangements until it was finally legally removed by the Thatcher government, with its successor adopting a much more accommodating approach to corporatist partnership formation. But the use and timing of partnership formation among British cities have varied. In the old-economy city of Birmingham, for example, local Labour leaders were much more pragmatic and never really flirted with New Left socialism (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Instead, after years of deindustrialization and economic decline, and in the midst of a wrenching recession in the early 1980s, a consensus emerged among Conservative and Labour leaders that the city must embark on a massive program of economic renewal. City council leaders and business elites fashioned a new institutional milieu to carry out its economic revitalization strategies, and publicprivate partnerships figured early and prominently in this strategy. These new institutional bases, which included the Aston Science Park partnership, the Birmingham Heartlands Urban Development Authority, and the Birmingham Marketing Partnership, were constructed on the basis of a corporatist mode of governance (DiGaetano and Lawless 1999). What distinguished
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Birmingham from the others, however, was that these partnerships were local initiatives, as in the United States, not simply reactions to central government grant programs and restrictions. A somewhat different pattern of partnership development can be found in Bristol. By the 1980s, Bristol had largely made the transition to the new economy, emerging as a regional financial and cultural capital in a region where high-technology industries had greatly expanded (see DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Less concerned about economic competition, the local Labour leadership generally eschewed partnership with the business community and resisted, to the extent possible, the Thatcher governments attempts to narrow the city councils authority and responsibilities (see DiGaetano 1997; Stewart 1996). Indeed, in the citys two bids for City Challenge grants in the early 1990s, both of which failed, council leaders all but scuttled the effort by refusing to generate support. Also, the council fought a protracted legal battle against the imposition of an urban development corporation, which ultimately met defeat in the House of Lords. In short, feeling threatened by devolution, local Labour leaders held firmly to and tried desperately to preserve the managerial mode of governance to which they had become accustomed. By the middle 1990s, however, a sea change in attitudes among members of in the Labour group had occurred, particularly among younger, better-educated councillors, who saw that if the council were to avoid becoming obsolete, it had to accept the tenets of partnership. This political shift transformed the citys institutional milieu. Over the last half of the 1990s, a network of public-private partnerships with interlocking membership was constructed in an effort to attract central government and European Union grants for the purposes of city center revitalization and urban regeneration. For example, city council leaders and the local business community established Bristol 2000 (renamed @Bristol) to attract government grants and coordinate city center redevelopment. The Bristol Regeneration Partnership, in turn, was formed to bid for and manage central government Single Regeneration Budget grants. And more recently, a partnership arrangement was created to administer the New Deal for Communities program in Bristol (Peterman 2002). As a consequence of Bristols embrace of partnership politics, a much more corporatist mode of governance has developed.
FRANCE: HIGHLY DEVOLVED STATISM
The institutional milieux of French urban governance has traditionally been dominated by local governing bodies, professionalized bureaucracies, and political parties, and thus largely the province of party politicians and civil servants operating on the basis of a managerial mode of governance (see
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Michel 1998; Ngrier 1999). Beginning in 1981, however, the French intergovernmental system underwent fundamental reorganization, when a highly decentralized system was put into place by Francois Mitterrands Socialist government. Communes, the lowest level of French government, gained substantial autonomy and power in the highly devolved intergovernmental system (Ngrier 1999). As a result, the local political system was transformed from one of primarily central-local bargaining to a multipolar system characterized by an increasingly complex process of negotiation in which several categories of actors (state experts, local councillors, territorial administrators, private interests and so forth) can legitimately claim an interest (Ngrier 1999, 127). The decentralized nature of the local governing system, combined with increased economic competition among cities in Europe, spawned a new kind of local leadership in French communespolitical entrepreneurialism (Levine 1994). As Levine (1994, 387) reports, The [decentralization] reforms further gave local governments new incentives and powers that led numerous mayors to act as entrepreneurs, raising taxes, and launching new projects. Decentralization helped to spawn a new class of dynamic, activist local leader, the maire-entrepreneur. In some cases, these entrepreneurial mayors joined with local business elites to retool the local institutional milieux to accommodate corporatist modes of governance. For example, the socialist and Communist mayors in the old-economy cities of Saint-Denis plain, Saint-Ouen, and Aubervilliers, all of whom had been firmly committed to municipal socialism, reversed themselves in the mid-1980s by accepting the politics of partnership. In Lille, to position the city for the expected European integration and in the process transform the citys old economic structure (steel, textiles, and shipbuilding), Mayor Pierre Mauroy (who also coincidently had served as prime minister in the 1980s) orchestrated the development of a number of large-scale projects (Channel Tunnel terminus, a high-speed train linkage, and a massive Eurail project) in concert with major figures in the local business community (John and Cole 1998; Le Gals 1990; Levine 1994). Nonetheless, accommodating corporatist partnership arrangements proved to be the exception in French urban governance. Indeed, the public sector has dominated most partnership arrangements in French cities. The statist tradition explains this persistence of a managerial mode of governance. As Savitch (1988,180) explains,
Beginning with the model of strong state/weak voluntary tradition, France utilitzes mixed corporations and the Etablissement Publique (EPA) to channel development and build housing. While mixed corporations have private
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shareholders, the majority shares are owned by the public sector and direction is led by public sector needs. For examples, EPAs are managed by government appointed administrators and board members, and most of the financing derives from public coffers.
In addition, intercommunal partnerships have been created to generate support for and coordinate these large-scale development projects. Lilles Mayor Mauroy, for instance, deftly coaxed the smaller cites in the Lille metropolitan area into an intercommunal coalition to support the massive publicly financed projects that were of regional as well as local importance. Similarly, the mode of governance changed little in the city of Rennes. With its economic base grounded in high technology, higher education, and administrative services, Rennes possessed a large cohort of middle-class residents employed in the citys new economy. This meant that the city experienced less pressure from economic competition. As a consequence, although a strategic partnership was formed in Rennes in the late 1980s, decision making tended to remain managerial in character, with the process of governance dominated by the mayor and his political inner circle (John and Cole 2000, 262). Managerial modes of governance also endured in other policy arenas. Bureaucrats, educational professionals, and central government policy makers remained the most important members of education policy networks in Lille and Rennes (John and Cole 2000). In a similar vein, compared to economic development and urban regeneration, the administration of social welfare in France relies much less on partnership arrangements (Geddes 2000; Oberti 2000). Antipoverty efforts and social welfare provision in Rennes followed the managerial model. Dominated by the public sector, collaboration with community sector nonprofits or religious organizations has been limited to administrative rather than strategic concerns (Oberti 2000). According to Oberti (2000, 541), the system of intervention in social problems in Rennes is very strongly framed by a public and bureaucratic logic which strongly institutionalizes the framework for intervention. Similarly, social welfare provision in Saint Etiene, with its economy tied closely to the mining industry and a predominately working-class culture, adopted the same managerial mode of governance as Rennes, with decision making and coordination anchored firmly in the municipal institutions so that community-based organizations have been relegated to a supporting role (Oberti 2000, 548-49). Also, in Mantes, the partnership requirements of the European Unions Poverty 3 grant program failed to produce viable partnership arrangements, as local government politicians and senior professionals continued to operate on the basis of insider decision making, a managerial model of governance (Geddes 2000).
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GERMANY: HIGHLY DEVOLVED STATISM
Like their American counterparts, German cities have confronted profound economic restructuring pressures within the context of a devolved state structure. But the institutional milieu of German cities is quite different, producing dissimilar partnership arrangements. German federalism provides for various forms of fiscal equalization between states and regulates the allocation of taxing power between levels of government, which serves to diminish the level of competition among subnational governments (Sellers 2002). German cities are governed by elected leaders and career bureaucrats; many have either a parliamentary or a city commission-type of government in which an elected cabinet provides oversight over strong, fairly autonomous functional agencies. The typical mode of urban governance is managerialism, with certain elements of corporatism. That is, public sector managers work with other public institutions (e.g., autonomous local marketing agencies, universities), unions, and organized business groups to meet the challenges presented by changing investment patterns and new social demands. Political parties also remain strong in German cities. And where one party has become entrenched (i.e., the Christian Democrats in some southern cities, the Social Democrats in northern industrial cities), clientelism has also developed, which in turn has shaped some partnership arrangements (Dyson 1977). The structural preconditions for increased partnership activity are similar to those in other countries. First, in old-economy cities, most notably those of the Ruhr-Rhine area and those of the north, disinvestment and job loss have been prevalent since the 1970s. Second, since the 1980s, and especially since the countrys reunification in 1990, federal transfers to cities have decreased just as cities have had to cope with greater competitive economic pressures. For many local governments, these changes have forced a reconsideration of traditional governing practices, as they have tried to become leaner, more efficient, and more flexible. To this end, many cities have sought new partnership arrangements with private sector actors with the goals of expediting development, improving local marketing, and leveraging private sector resources to help financially strapped towns and cities carry out their work (Heinz 1998). The most common sorts of ventures, which can be accomplished without challenging prevailing modes of governance, involve full or partial privatization of municipal resources. Hoping to get quick fixes of capital and believing that the private sector will manage these enterprises more efficiently than the public sector, cities have begun selling off part ownerships in their housing companies and utilities. The result is a growing number of joint ventures in these areas (Pttner 1998).
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As in the other cases, the most complex partnerships aimed at promoting economic development are most fully evolved in old-economy cities; struggling cities governed by the Left (Social Democrats) were as likely to seek such relationships as Christian-Democratic conservatives led cities. In the early 1980s, responding to long-term job loss and planned retrenchment at the steel maker Hoesch, one of the citys major employers, Dortmunds Social Democratic mayor launched a series of meetings involving unions, universities, business organizations, and representatives of major employers. The outcome of these meetings was a comprehensive economic plan that included a 10-fold increase in the citys economic development budget, and leveraged state, national, and EU funds for workforce development (Hennings and Kunzmann 1990). The mayor and his economic development advisors also initiated plans for the creation of the Dortmund Technology Center (one of the countrys first technology transfer centers) and the Dortmund Technology Park. Associated with the two local universities, the participants in these two still-successful projects included the city, the Trade Chamber, and seven public and private financial institutions. Also in the 1980s, the leaders of Hamburg moved away from a decadesold strategy of trying to strengthen traditional shipping and manufacturing industries to a new approach (dubbed by the chamber of commerce from the ship to the chip) that combined investment in high-technology industry and redevelopment of the city center. The mayor, the chamber of commerce, and other economic elites worked closely together in carrying out this plan to attract new investment. Together, they established the Hamburg Business Development Corporation, capitalized by the city and the 10 largest regional banks and headed by a private sector manager, which worked to attract new investment. Because the Social Democratic mayor was also concerned with holding on to his partys base and appealing to powerful labor unions, Hamburgs leaders also instituted a number of labor market programs to help redundant workers (Dangschat and Ossenbrgge 1990). There are also examples of partnerships in which public and private sector actors work cooperatively to redevelop central city areas, usually forming development companies in which each partner has a financial stake. One of the first such projects was the Media Park in Cologne (an abandoned freight yard was redeveloped by a company created by the city, the state, and a private media firm); since then, similar mixed companies have carried out redevelopment projects in the centers of Frankfurt, Dortmund (Heinz 1998), and Kassel (Gerstlberger 1999). Mixed enterprises have also been created for large, time-limited projects, like civic birthday celebrations (e.g., Bonn 2000, Berlin 750), Olympic campaigns (Munich hosted the games in 1972; Berlin applied to host the 2000 games), and worlds fairs. In some cities, these
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organizations have outlived their projects. In Berlin, the organization formed to bid for the Olympic games was retooled into Partners for Berlin, a city marketing concern involving about 80 local companies (many publicly owned) and the citys commerce department. In a few cases, cities have sought new governance arrangements to keep pace with increasing intersectoral participation in development policy. Many cities, including Berlin (Strom 2001) and Kassel (Gerstlberger 1999), created public development and marketing corporations in the 1980s and 1990s. Such enterprises have generally been initiated by city authorities, which have then sought the participation of business chambers, labor unions (at least in Social Democratic cities), and public banks. These organizations are thought to bring a more entrepreneurial quality to the task of facilitating private investment. Informal roundtables have, in many cases, served to supplement less nimble formal processes, especially for cities needing to mobilize a range of actors to face rapid economic change. The meetings convened by the mayor of Dortmund to confront the loss of Hoechst employment in the early 1980s represent one such example (Hennings and Kunzmann 1990). Economic development roundtables were even more common among East German cities in the wake of reunification. One prominent example was Berlins Stadtforum (city forum), created by Berlins Urban Development senator during the chaotic postunification period (Strom 2001). Such governance forms have managerial characteristicsthey seek greater efficiency by contracting out complex tasksbut they are embedded in corporatist practice, as they seek to include a variety of official interest intermediaries in the decision-making process. Although business chambers and private sector companies can be found in most German partnerships, the public sector tends to dominate. In virtually all the cases named here, elected officials or bureaucrats initiated partnership projects and played the most prominent role in their management. Partnerships in the Kassel area, for instance, were managed by politically appointed governing boards, whose primary concern was to minimize the public sectors financial risk (Gerstlberger 1999). Sellers (2002) finds that a strong bureaucracy and robust ruling party reduced the governing role of business organizations in Mnster. Indeed, the actors most commonly found on the private side of the partnership are often closely tied to the public sector, the banks most frequently found in partnership projects are usually state controlled, and the trade chambers that generally represent the private sectors participation are staffed by civil servants and provide many services under contract to the government. Generally, when German cities have sought to form coalitions in support of comprehensive development programs, they have not included business leaders to the extent found in the United States or
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even Britain. Rather, partnerships tend to follow corporatist patterns, bringing together disparate parts of the public sector with select state-sanctioned interest intermediaries.
THE VALUE OF AN INTEGRATED APPROACH The relationship among the three levels of analysis is dynamic, as factors at one level help shape responses on another. The medium of interaction among the structural context, culture, and political actors is the institutional milieu of urban governance. Globalization and state devolution has led to substantial change in the institutions of urban politics in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, but in none of these countries has the slate been wiped clean by large-scale international or national transformations. Political institutions, in other words, mediate the impact of structural forces. Whether a polity embraces the prospect of a globalized economy or tries to resist it is in part influenced by the sorts of institutions and practices by which it is governed. What is more, national and local political cultures also shape the process of institutional formation, and the rate and degree of institutional change has varied considerably between nations with strong or weak state traditions. Political leaders, as rational actors, also affect the fate of urban institutional milieux, as they attempt to maintain, modify, or radically transform institutions to serve their own ambitions. Once established, however, such institutions are not merely instruments of political actorsthey act as a kind of social memory, imprinting the conflicts of the present with the institutional legacy of the past (Hall 1986, 233). Institutions in an urban system thus help to shape what seems rational to rational actors and make certain kinds of coalitions more likely to form and succeed. Understanding the similarities and differences among partnership arrangements in these four countries has required an integrated three-level analysis. In all four cases, the preconditions for public-private partnerships were found in the structural context. Cities in all four countries faced similar pressures from economic restructuring forces operating at the transnational level. These forces have produced a decline in manufacturing employment and increased importance of services and knowledge-intensive industries. Our comparisons also reveal some degree of state devolution in all four settings, but the downward shift of governing responsibility played out differently in the decentralized U.S. state, the far more centralized authority of the United Kingdom, and the hybrid Federal Republic of Germany. These structural features of the political economy have given shape to the relationships
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between the local state and market and condition the sorts of partnership arrangements that are considered desirable and feasible. But the rather blunt macro analysis used by structural theorists would not pick up the enormous variation in partnership arrangements and politics both across and within the four countries analyzed. Cultural traditions and norms engendered a variety of responses to economic and political restructuring. Although not a hard and fast rule, the countries with strong state traditions France and Germanyhave tended toward managerialism. In France, the most significant partnerships have been public-public arrangements, that is, intercommune and cooperative arrangements among national, regional, departmental, and commune officials and politicians. Although corporatist practices emerged in some French cities around economic development, managerialism prevailed in most cities and policy areas. German governance has straddled managerialism and corporatism: Public sector dominance has given government rule makers the leading role in urban governance, but consultation with sanctioned interests is built into German traditions as well as into federal planning and urban renewal laws. In contrast, public-private partnerships flourished in the countries with weaker state traditions. Partnerships became well-developed corporatist arrangements in many American and British cities, with business leaders in particular playing prominent roles in local policy making. Although quite adept at explaining much of the variation across and within the four countries, a two-tiered analysis (structural and cultural) would fail to detect the role of political actors in explaining patterns of urban governance. In all four countries, local leaders chose partnership arrangements both in response to changing structural conditions and to changing national policies. National programs in the United States (e.g., Urban Development Action Grant and Empowerment Zones) and Great Britain (e.g., City Challenge, Single Regeneration, and New Deal in the Community grants) explicitly created incentives for public officials to seek out private partners. In all four countries, national retrenchment practices decreased the value to local officials of vertical alliances and increased the value of collaboration with the private sector. Moreover, much of the variation within the four countries can be attributed to differences in the local responses to the politics of partnershipwith some political actors resisting its institutionalization and others accommodating with tenacity. This is particularly true in explaining the timing and character of partnership formation. Some cities where leaders were more innovative, like Pittsburgh and Birmingham (England), became some of the early incubators of public-private partnerships in their respective countries. In cities like Saint-Denis plain, Manchester, Leeds, Dortmund, and Hamburg, entrepreneurial leftist mayors and council leaders pragmatically
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endorsed corporatist partnership arrangements as a means for promoting economic development in their old-economy cities. Also, partnerships did not always assume a corporatist mode of governance. Urban populism prevailed in some American cities, like Boston in the 1980s, because mayors and community activists put great stock in creating participatory mechanisms that allowed for grassroots mobilization in the governing process. Also, urban leaders in France remained firmly committed to the provision of social welfare through a managerial mode of governance. Interestingly, the calculations and responses of political actors to economic and political restructuring were conditioned by the local institutional milieux. In cities with strong mayor forms of government, like many in the United States and France, personal leadership is more likely to be a factor in explaining outcomes; case studies of U.S. and French cities reveal that the rate and degree of institutional change varied depending on the political interests and ambitions of their mayors. It will be interesting to learn whether this also holds true in Britain for cities that have adopted mayor-council forms of government. Our review of urban partnerships, in sum, demonstrates the utility of an integrated comparative approach. Single and two-level analyses fail to explain the respective roles played by the structural contexts, culture, and political actors in the process of urban governance. But by beginning with structural context and then incorporating analyses of culture and political actions in determining patterns of institutional development in urban governance, a more complete and robust comparative analysis is possible.
Notes
1. The modes of governance model developed here is a modification of the governing structures typology conceived by DiGaetano and Lawless (1999). 2. If space had allowed, we would have included social structuring and restructuring in our analysis of the structural context, arguing that the changing class, racial, and ethnic composition of city populations affect the institutional milieux of urban governance in important ways (see, for example, DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). However, because social restructuring would not figure prominently in the analysis of partnership politics in the third part of the article, we chose to omit discussion of it in this theoretical portion as well.
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Alan DiGaetano is a professor of political science at Baruch CollegeCUNY. He specializes in the study of urban politics and has written extensively on urban governance in both the American context and comparatively. This includes the book, coauthored by John Klemanski, Power and City Governance: Comparative Perspectives on Urban Development (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). His work has also been published
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in Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Urban History, and Policy and Politics. He is currently conducting research on the development of the local state in Britain and the United States. Elizabeth Strom is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers UniversityNewark. She is the author of Building the New Berlin: The Politics of Urban Development in Germanys New Capital (Lexington Books, 2001), as well as articles published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Review, and German Politics and Society. Her current research concerns the role of educational and cultural institutions in downtown development.
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1177/1078087402238806 URBANGOVERNANCE DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

COMPARATIVE URBAN GOVERNANCE An Integrated Approach

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

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Modes of Urban Governance Clientelistic Corporatist Managerial Pluralist Populist

Particularistic, Exclusionary personalized, negotiation exchange

Governing logic Key decision makers

Consensus building Politicians and powerful civic leaders Purposive

Politicians and clients

Political Material objectives

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AN INTEGRATED MODEL FOR COMPARING URBAN GOVERNANCE

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DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

GERMANY: HIGHLY DEVOLVED STATISM

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2003

DiGaetano, Strom / COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

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