From Neighbors to Partners: The Adoption of Interlocal Government Collaboration in the United States, 1977–2007
| DOI | 10.1177/0095399720960483 |
| Author | Meghan E. Rubado |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Administration & Society
2021, Vol. 53(5) 708 –736
From Neighbors to
© The Author(s) 2020
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of Interlocal Government
Collaboration in the
United States, 1977–2007
Meghan E. Rubado1
Abstract
Local governments in the United States frequently collaborate with
neighboring localities for service provision despite the high costs of this
strategy. Using the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, this
article argues that a key explanation of interlocal collaboration lies in the
way local leaders learn from the behavior of neighboring jurisdictions
that collaborate, which alters the transaction costs of their own potential
collaborations. Using a data set of financial transfers for 35,000 jurisdictions
over a 30-year span, the article shows that localities are more likely to
collaborate when a larger share of their neighbors collaborated in the past.
Keywords
interlocal collaboration, public administration, institutional collective action
Local governments in the United States regularly engage in voluntary col-
laboration with neighboring jurisdictions to provide essential services to their
residents. Cities may enter into agreements with one another to share staff or
resources, to consolidate provision of some services, to coordinate economic
development efforts, or to protect shared natural resources (Feiock, 2013;
1Cleveland State University, OH, USA
Corresponding Author:
Meghan E. Rubado, Cleveland State University, 1717 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44115, USA.
Email: m.rubado@csuohio.edu
Rubado
709
Feiock & Scholz, 2010). Collaboration across jurisdictions is a high-cost
activity that involves uncertainty and risk. Costs include those associated
with information collection, negotiation, monitoring, and enforcement among
localities with distinct, even competing, goals and preferences (Feiock,
2007). Despite these obstacles, interlocal collaboration for service provision
is a common tool of public administration. Existing scholarship has not suf-
ficiently explained why general-purpose local governments regularly engage
in this behavior, given its risks and costs.
Previous research suggests local governments’ decisions to collaborate
may be related to factors such as fiscal stress (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003;
Shrestha, 2008; Stein, 1990), federal incentives (Bickers & Stein, 2004), the
types of goods or services being provided (Andrew, 2009b), and entrepre-
neurial city leadership (Zeemering, 2008). Other studies have established a
relationship between cities’ contextual environment and their decisions to
collaborate, theorizing that city leaders choose to collaborate when they have
stronger interpersonal connections with neighboring cities’ leaders or when a
large supply of potential partners is readily available (Deslatte & Feiock,
2019; Kwon & Feiock, 2010; Kwon et al., 2014; LeRoux et al., 2010;
Minkoff, 2013; Post, 2004; Thurmaier & Wood, 2002). Past academic litera-
ture on the topic of interlocal collaboration, however, has applied empirical
tests to single regions, a few cities, or a larger cross section of cities at one
point in time, making it difficult to fully decipher how context matters for
collaboration.
This article leverages 30 years of Census of Governments (COG) data to
demonstrate that local governments throughout the United States become
more likely to engage in formal interlocal collaboration when a larger share
of their neighboring peers were collaborating in the past. The theory devel-
oped and tested here applies the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) frame-
work, which posits that local leaders engage in interlocal collaboration when
the benefits outweigh the transaction costs of the agreement (Feiock, 2013).
The theory explained below argues that an essential part of the explanation
for interlocal collaboration stems from the way past collaborative agreements
among general-purpose local governments alter the costs and incentives of
collaboration for proximate jurisdictions. As some localities experiment with
collaborative agreements and succeed, leaders in neighboring localities
become more likely to begin their own collaborative experiments to realize
similar gains. Leaders who see their neighbors saving money and improving
services through collaboration may gain sufficient information to push the
transaction costs of their own collaborative agreements below expected ben-
efits—leading to new collaboration. Interlocal collaboration as a strategy of
local government, then, travels across space and time as new information is
710
Administration & Society 53(5)
revealed to local leaders, reducing transaction costs for collaboration and
making this strategy more likely to be adopted by neighboring jurisdictions.
This article borrows from the policy diffusion literature to uncover mecha-
nisms at work in the shifts in cost-benefit analysis that occur as a result of
past and ongoing collaboration among partners within a region. Learning and
development of networks of trust, as well as interlocal competition for tax
base, are identified as important drivers of these shifts in local government
calculus.
To test this theory, the analysis uses an original data set of interlocal finan-
cial transfers among noncounty, general-purpose local governments in the
United States from 1977 to 2007. The data allow for comparison of collab-
orative behavior over a 30-year period across local governments of all sizes,
both inside and outside of metropolitan regions. Analysis of transfer patterns
shows that local governments are more likely to collaborate when a higher
proportion of neighbors were collaborating in the past. The data reveal that
cities respond to the past collaborative agreements of their neighbors. This
finding provides value for scholars and practitioners, illuminating why col-
laboration occurs when and where it does, as well as why it may be unlikely
to occur under some conditions.
Interlocal Collaboration
Interlocal collaboration occurs when “two or more governments act collec-
tively to capture the gains from providing or producing services across a
larger area” (Feiock, 2007, p. 48). This definition includes formal collabora-
tive contracts and written agreements among local governments, as well as
informal arrangements such as information sharing, handshake deals, and
working groups (Andrew, 2009a; Feiock, 2004, 2013; Feiock & Scholz,
2010; Terman et al., 2020). Sometimes, agreements involve the exchange of
funds, but other times, they do not. Formal agreements could involve sharing
of services that result in revenue-service exchange or they could simply
divide labor and resources among the localities in a way that does not require
financial transfer. Examples include coordinated purchase of materials or
equipment to realize economies of scale, sharing of an assessor or an admin-
istrator among several jurisdictions, and contracting among multiple cities
for police or fire services. These kinds of collaborative service arrangements
are common and sometimes even the dominant form of governance in par-
ticular regions (Wood, 2008).
The question of why local governments collaborate with one another to
provide public goods and services has received much attention in past research.
Scholars have approached this question from numerous perspectives, linking
Rubado
711
collaborative behavior to heightened incentives caused by increased externali-
ties over time (Scholz & Stiftel, 2005), to federal grant opportunities (Bickers
& Stein, 2004), to the influence of local council members (Zeemering, 2008),
and to social networks that provide information and reduce transaction costs
(Andrew, 2006; Kwon & Feiock, 2010). Leaders in cities under severe fiscal
stress may select collaboration as a means of political survival—that is, to
avoid electoral failure due to citizen dissatisfaction, or even total elimination
of the local government as collaboration may serve as an alternative to local
government consolidation or annexation (Carr & Feiock, 2004). However, cit-
ies that are relatively poor compared with their neighbors may be seen as less
attractive partners, making interlocal collaboration less available to struggling
cities in ways that may exacerbate interjurisdictional inequality (Feiock, 2014;
Reynolds, 2003).
Local governance in the U.S. context is highly fragmented, with many
neighboring jurisdictions providing general tax-and-spend packages within
distinct boundaries. In addition, layers of overlapping single-purpose districts
responsible for specific functions add another dimension of complexity to
local service provision (Berry, 2009; Mullin, 2009). This fragmented system
means that efficient solutions to local problems are often confounded by col-
lective action dilemmas, externalities, and common-pool resource problems.
The efforts of localities to collaborate may face hurdles, such as defection of
collaborators, domination by a single collaborator, and irresolvable conflict
among participants (Feiock & Scholz, 2010; E. Ostrom, 1990, 2005).
The theory developed here relies upon the ICA framework. The ICA
framework extends theories of contracting and individual collective action
problems to group or...
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