Fostering Regionalism: Comment on "The Promise and Perils of 'New Regionalist' Approaches to Sustainable Communities"

INTRODUCTION In The Promise and Perils of "New Regionalist" Approaches to Sustainable Communities, Professor Lisa Alexander provides a timely assessment of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's new Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program ("the Program"). (1) This fledgling Program harkens back to an era from the 1950s through the 1970s when the federal government funded regional planning and coordination. (2) As Professor Alexander notes, however, the Program is novel in the sophistication of its goals--particularly around sustainability and regional equity--and in the explicitly bottom-up experimentalist frame it adopts. (3) Indeed, the Program's promise can be found largely in what Professor Alexander identifies as its "new governance" elements--namely, its broadly collaborative, devolutionary design. (4) Professor Alexander's primary concern--the peril she highlights--is the risk that power imbalances may undermine distributive justice as the Program unfolds. (5) Alexander argues that failures of demographic representation, opportunism, and acquiescence challenge the fundamentally collaborative premise of new governance. (6) These failures can cause seemingly promising broad-scale partnerships to privilege traditionally dominant interests. In essence, Alexander identifies a tension between the Program's new governance process and its new regionalist normative goals. In addition, her close, contextual examination of the Madison, WI and Dane County Regional Area consortium demonstrates this tension in practice. (7) This is an important tension to surface, although inherent in the Program's new governance approach is an appropriate degree of caution about being overly prescriptive in setting federal mandates. For many implementation choices, however compelling, there are likely to be competing imperatives. As it develops, the Program will have to balance the benefits of deferring to local initiative, knowledge, and institutional resources against the need to ensure a measure of meaningful inclusion. Professor Alexander's analysis, however, points to a larger conceptual point about the distinctive role that the federal government can play in incentivizing new regionalism. (8) One reason the kind of metropolitan collaboration the Program encourages has not been more widely embraced is that a kind of pervasive political and legal stasis can hold fast the state and local institutions that might otherwise recognize transcendent interests. When the federal government approaches regionalism, however, it is functionally less beholden to that institutional framework and can accordingly foster regionalism with an outsider's detachment. This brief Comment will suggest, then, that although the ability to approach regionalism from a national perspective does not ensure that local power dynamics will not be replicated, the distance and independence that the federal perspective provides--a kind of remove so often derided--may in fact be a cause for optimism, particularly for those traditionally marginalized at the local level. ORTHOGONAL INTERVENTION--A FEDERAL ROLE IN NEW REGIONALISM The kind of local power dynamics underlying Professor Alexander's cautionary tale highlights an underappreciated aspect of what the Program may accomplish. One of the great dilemmas in regionalism is that for all of the manifest logic that a multi-jurisdictional, metropolitan approach holds for responding to a myriad of policy challenges, the power of localism remains mains deeply embedded. There are many reasons for this path dependency, many of which are entirely legitimate. But resistance to meaningful regional collaboration can often seem to be as much about the equilibrium reached in an entrenched state and local political economy. As Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron have noted, local government structure is shaped by interaction with the states, (9) and it can be in the mutual interests of states and their localities not to distribute political power in any meaningful way to intermediate institutions. …