Regional governance and collaboration: A comparative study on economic development policy process in Minneapolis and Pittsburgh regions

With increasing competition for economic development, the importance of a metropolitan region as a unit of governance has been recurrently stressed. But in light of a fragmented local political environment, encouraging local governments to participate in collective actions is theoretically unexpected and empirically difficult. How has each metropolitan region dealt with this problem? Are there different patterns of collaboration that are undertaken by each region? And how can we systematically characterize different approaches inherent in the governance of metropolitan regions? This dissertation states that existing literature on regional governance is not able to answer these questions correctly because they do not acknowledge the multiple dimensionality of governance. Not only the level of structural fragmentation but also the political and cultural aspects of governance should be seriously considered as the significant factor that determines the forms of regional governance.;Two highly fragmented regions of Minneapolis and Pittsburgh are selected as the empirical cases to which theoretical models are tested. From a macro point of view, this study systemizes governance structures in two regions and identifies two models of regional governance: Integrated and Isolated models. In the integrated model represented by Minneapolis, inter-organizational relationships are metropolitan-wide, intergovernmental oriented, and politically and culturally integrated at the metropolitan level. In the isolated model represented by Pittsburgh, this dissertation empirically proves that inter-municipal collaboration is less favored, and the metropolitan region is built upon intergovernmental competition along with high level of vertical integration at state level.;This argument on regional governance is supported from the micro perspective, by empirical analyses on the extent and patterns of inter-organizational collaboration in the field of economic development in the Minneapolis and Pittsburgh regions. Based on the modal approach to governance, this study proves that along with structural factors such as the level of fragmentation and institutional forms of government, the intensity of political integration of local government is also strongly associated with the extent of inter-organizational collaboration. In addition, it also describes the regional differences in the patterns of collaboration and how the inter-organizational networks are differently structured in two regions.