| One of the main puzzles to scholars in the field of urban studies and public policy is that the fragmentation of jurisdictional authorities in metropolitan areas creates a self-organizing community to address intergovernmental problems such as economies of scale, negative externalities, urban sprawl, income inequality, environmental impact, and so on. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how and to what extent those mechanisms affect the emergence of self-organizing interlocal collaboration to address regional economic development by focusing on the nature of collective action, contextual aspects of regional problems, and network relationships of local jurisdictions.;This study investigates both the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework and social network theory to understand how the nature of collective action, contextual aspects of regional problems, and the embedded network relationship of local jurisdictions help or deter the creation of regional governance mechanisms. By focusing on regional partnerships for economic development in US metropolitan areas, this study examines the role of economic demand, transaction costs, and tightly-clustered and information-bridging network structures of metropolitan areas in building up multilateral voluntary regional organizations for economic development activities.;In order to provide a complete discussion about the underlying mechanisms of regional collaboration and achieve the potential inferential value from a closer integration of rigorous theorizing and empiricism, this study employs both analytic formal modeling and empirical statistical testing in its methodological approach in its two stages of research design: first, a formal model of regional partnership formation has been developed to investigate how the nature and composition of participants in a collective situation affects the likelihood of partnership formation. Based purely on game theoretic motivation---a rational calculation of the benefits and costs of collaboration---this formal model examines the effect of group size, degree of decision fragmentation, and benefits/costs structure on regional collaboration. The second stage has shed more light on deriving statistical inferences on how contextual and relational factors, along with the nature of collective action in the first stage, affect regional partnership formation.;The results suggest the evidence of distinctive roles for all three groups of variables identified in this dissertation: the nature of collective action, contextual aspects of regional problems, and network relationships of local jurisdictions.;First, the nature of collective action demonstrates that the uncertainty around collective action comes from group size (the number of participants), the degree of decision fragmentation, and benefits/costs structure. The degree of decision fragmentation shows a non-linear relationship with regional partnership formation suggesting that voluntary regional development partnership is more likely to emerge in cases (1) where there is a local jurisdiction which has a better position to attract an additional member to build a minimal provision coalition, and (2) when the decision making power of local governments is relatively equally diffused. This further implies that there is always a tension between the motivation of individual local jurisdictions to overcome collective action dilemmas by counting on the role of dominant or leading actors and their intentions to exercise a maximum level of autonomy and control in their economic development decision. Therefore, overall configurations of regional partnership heavily depend upon the level of uncertainty and the extent to which local jurisdictions attempt to retain their local autonomy.;Second, the results demonstrate that some contextual factors, especially the transaction costs caused by community heterogeneity, deter regional partnership from being formed. Especially, the results show that race dissimilarity, along with its positive interaction with income dissimilarity, is negatively associated with regional partnership formation. This suggests that (1) race dissimilarity across local jurisdictions generally decreases the chance of regional collaboration being established, and (2) race dissimilarity is more problematic when it is isolated than when it is combined with median income dissimilarity.;Third, two aspects of the relational network factor are found to be influential on increasing the likelihood of regional collaboration. The results demonstrate that both previous experience in regional collaboration for economic development and repeated interactions with each other over voluntary service agreements increase the adoption of metropolitan collaboration by providing mechanisms that mitigate credible commitment problems. On the other hand, the results also indicate that the probabilities of regional partnership being established grow as the number of civic organizations per capita increases. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
