The next big thing in local government.

• Author: O'Neill, Robert J., Jr.
• Position: Commentary

Many challenges lie ahead. Cities and counties will need to collaborate and innovate as never before.

Where is local government going? In an era of tumultuous change and declining trust in government, cities and counties face major attitudinal and demographic forces, including competition for resources devoted to the "graying" and the "browning" of America and population and generational changes in government workforces. And there's another, perhaps overarching, challenge: the difficulty taxpayers have in thinking about government as experimental when experimental thinking will be exactly what will be needed in the coming decades.

Certainly challenges like those--not to mention those as yet unforeseen --are going to do much to shape the future direction of local government. They were among the forces identified by a panel of experts in a recent live-streamed discussion I moderated. Co-sponsored by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and the Alliance for Innovation (AFI), the webcast was part of a larger "Next Big Thing" project sponsored by AFI.

So what will be the next big thing? There were plenty of ideas among the panelists: Shannon Flanagan-Watson, assistant county manager, Arlington County, Virginia; John Nalbandian, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas; Marc Ott, city manager, Austin, Texas; and Rebecca Ryan, a futurist and founder of Next Generation Consulting. Here are some of their thoughts.

Collaboration. We will see a merging of the public, non-profit, and private sectors, blending public purpose with private capital to address a number of public-service-provision challenges. We will also use innovative financing and public-private partnerships to help public agencies amortize the cost of infrastructure operations and management. When the City of Denver, Colorado, looked for ways to fund the last bit of its high-speed rail system, for example, the city involved investors from Spain in a nuanced and complex financing deal. Agreements such as these will require local governments to develop a new set of navigational management skills.

Technology and Citizens. Much will turn on whether and how cities and counties and the people they serve use sensors, data, networking, and other technological infrastructure to become "smart" jurisdictions, and how they leverage that technology to better engage their residents. In Sweden and some parts of the United States, for example, local governments have...