Research-based analysis and commentary http://uwwebpro.uwinnipeg.ca/faculty/politics/faculty home.htmFebruary 18, 2010
CASE STUDIES CAN PRODUCE THEORETICAL ADVANCES: HERE'S AN EXAMPLE
Case studies have unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigations of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. It is argued that the case study is, at best, a preliminary step, in that it may generate hypotheses that can later be tested using such “more reliable” methods as standardized questionnaires or statistical data. In the study of politics, however, that sequence of research initiatives may well work better in reverse.
When political action generates new policies, or creates new states of affairs, these changes invariably come complete with a set of justifications, with or without a claim that the justifications are founded in scientific investigation or well-established social theory. Often, a very effective way of testing such claims, and the social science backing them, is to do a case study of the policy, or the changed state of affairs, enquiring into its causes and the effects it has produced, in order to test the validity of the original justification. A series of such case studies may, in turn, generate insights that are capable of producing theoretical advances.
Immigration and homelessness studies
A case in point is a series of case studies I've undertaken, now nearing completion, that were designed to test the efficacy of government immigration and homelessness policies, and, as well, to test some theoretical propositions I had earlier formulated - on the basis of other case studies - about the much-underestimated policy significance urban population growth rates.
In order to produce theory, studies must be grounded in theory. The starting-point for my case study series was the widely held recognition that globalization has moved cities to centre-stage in societies everywhere. Our collective well-being, both economic and social, depends on the prosperity and well-being of our cities, because, although we need food, minerals and other products of the countryside, it is cities that are our primary centres of creativity, decision-making, and ultimately of wealth-generation.
Globalization has sharpened our awareness of this reality because free trade agreements have reduced the capacity of national governments to protect urban regions from international competition, and modern communications have reduced the importance of location, plunging cities everywhere into direct competition with each other. Accordingly, we need to think carefully about how our political decision-making affects our cities. Governments everywhere, including the Canadian government, are doing that, by trying to find ways of ensuring that national policies contribute to the economic viability and social health of cities and communities.
This task is complicated by the fact that each community is as unique as each human individual. Therefore, although it is possible to set national objectives and standards that apply to all communities, complete uniformity of policy making and implementation is probably not achievable and is, in any event, undesirable, because what works in one city may not work in another. The Canadian government has addressed this reality by trying to ensure that the implementation of national policies can be tailored to the particularities of different communities.
My study focused on two examples of policies designed in this way: the National Homelessness Initiative and Immigration and Settlement. My research assistants and I looked at the implementation of these policies in three very different cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick - in order to test whether these policies were successfully adapted to a range of very different local conditions.
Findings
Here are some of our most interesting findings:
The rate of a city's population growth plays a critical, and widely overlooked role in determining the appropriateness of different policy choices. Policies that may be appropriate for rapidly growing cities are different from those that are appropriate for slow-growth cities. There is a strong tendency, however, for decision-makers in slow-growth cities to pretend that they will be able to increase their rates of growth, and premise their policies on future rapid growth - growth that rarely materializes.
The National Homelessness Initiative (NHI) contained provisions for consultation with local service providers to determine how NHI funding would be allocated. However, the NHI was created to address conditions in rapid-growth cities, and federal government policy in this area was not sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation to the very different circumstances in slow-growth cities. As a result, NHI policies that were reasonably responsive to conditions in Vancouver proved ill adapted to the circumstances of Winnipeg and Saint John.
Federal immigration and settlement policies were adapted to local circumstances via federal-provincial agreements that devolved some responsibilities to provincial governments. In Vancouver, a famously effective network of settlement service providers suffered setbacks stemming from the British Columbia government's rigidly ideological approach to service provision. In Saint John, immigration and settlement objectives were thwarted by a local culture that proved relatively unreceptive to immigration. In Winnipeg, the provincial government implemented a set of immigration and settlement policies that have been recognized as a model, thanks to extensive consultation with service providers and flexible, thoughtful administration of a provincial nominee program.
Conclusion
The theory about the surprising importance of growth rates in setting the conditions for a wide range of policies first occurred to me because I had done case studies on a variety of subjects in such rapidly growing centres as Toronto, Vancouver and Portland, Oregon; and such slow-growth centres as Winnipeg and Edmonton, when the latter was a slow-growth centre. Because I was doing case studies, I was not narrowly focused on my particular research questions because case studies require the researcher to look broadly at the context of the question being investigated. As a result, I could not help noticing the striking differences among the cities I studied, and the way in which those differences corresponded to differences in rates of population growth.
In my comparative case studies of immigration and homelessness policies, growth rates were one of the criteria I had in mind in selecting research sites. The findings of those studies gave insights into the two policy areas and into some of the problems and possibilities of multi-level governance. But they also confirmed that policy and implementation problems were different in different cities, and that those differences were strongly influenced by population growth rates.
••••••••••••••••••••••
For more about slow growth, see:
Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy". Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, pp. 193-213.
Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth”. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28 (2), 2006, pp. 169-89.
For more about the findings regarding homelessness and immigration, see:
Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240
Christopher Leo, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City”. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.
Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.
Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism". Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009, 93-116.
Posted by leo-c at 1:49 PM
April 10, 2009
IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, URBANIZING MUNICIPALITIES CERTAINLY CAN'T
It is becoming more evident with each passing year that urban growth is a matter national concern. The growing ease and speed of the global movement of money, goods, people and ideas has made it more and more clear that the prosperity of nations is heavily dependent on the prosperity of cities. At the same time, poorly managed urban growth is a major contributor to the global-scale environmental problems we face. For both environmental and economic reasons, therefore, we need to think of urban growth as a national and global issue, not a purely local one.
In my previous post, I showed how, in North America, city councils are entrusted with many of the decisions that determine the growth of our cities. Since these councils frequently lack the political will to resist the blandishments of developers, in practice, we are allowing the cost accounting of individual development companies to play a major role in determining the growth of cities.
The question of whether the location and design of a new development responds to environmental concerns, and maximizes the city's ability to maintain the viability of its network of infrastructure and services, is unlikely to be high on an individual developer's list of concerns. The developer's responsibility is to shareholders, not the city as a whole. In other words, far from being responsive to national and global concerns, the growth of cities, typically, is not even responsive to the best interests of the city as a whole.
It gets worse. Most North American cities, or metropolitan areas, are actually loose agglomerations of municipalities. In those metropolitan areas, a significant amount of the growth is taking place in municipalities that are partly or largely rural. In such communities, control over growth may be even looser than it is in major cities.
I gained an insight into growth at the urban fringe a few years ago, when I attended two sessions of a Manitoba Municipal Board panel that was deciding whether to recommend approval of the proposed official plan of the Springfield Municipality, an agricultural area and bedroom community immediately east of Winnipeg. The municipality’s proposed new official municipal plan defined four land forms in the municipality:
•Two high-potential agricultural areas,
•An area near a provincial park that is the prime source of ground water for the municipality and
•An area that is defined as having lower agricultural potential.
In defining objectives for development of the municipality, the plan stressed the high priority placed on:
•Preserving agricultural viability and natural resources and
•Preventing proliferation of residential development.
A substantial scholarly literature cites a variety of ways that residential development in farming areas damages the viability of agriculture: complaints from urban residents about smells, heavy machinery on roads and other perceived nuisances resulting from agriculture; residential activities that interfere with farming operations such as commuter traffic, harassment of farm animals by pets; and escalation of land prices that inflate the cost of farming.
The proposed Springfield official plan itself stated that the growth potential of livestock husbandry had already been limited by past residential development. To this point in the plan, therefore, an analysis of land forms indicated the location of good agricultural areas and important water resources, while statements of objectives stressed the determination to preserve these assets in the face of urbanization.
However, the proposed zoning categories set out in later chapters of the plan appeared to have been established by someone who did not read the chapters containing planning principles. Most of the residential development was planned for the larger of the two prime agricultural areas and in the area where the major resource of ground water is located. All the residential development on top of the prime water resource relies on septic tanks for sewage disposal, which invariably poses a greater risk to ground water than a community sewage system.
There was a cluster of residential development planned as well in the community of Anola, which is located in the low-potential agricultural area and would therefore seem to be the natural area for urban development if harm to agriculture were to be minimized, but that community was slated to receive only a limited amount of development because it was not to be provided with the water and sewer services needed for higher concentrations of development.
Nor were there any plans for providing Anola with services, even though the plan stated that there was a demand for residential development there. Meanwhile, two urban communities in the middle of the prime agricultural area, Oakbank and Dugald, had been provided with the services required for higher concentrations of urban development. In short, everything possible was done to encourage urban development in those areas which the plan claimed a determination to protect, and almost nothing done to encourage development in the area that the plan designated as unsuitable for other purposes: a good line of talk, but no action to back it up.
Attendance at two hearings of the municipal board panel provided insights into the sources of this exercise in appearing to plan without actually doing so. From a variety of statements that were made, it became clear that numerous residents of the municipality had been able to improve their fortunes by subdividing farmland in the past, in order to sell it for residential development, and that others wished to do so in future. When witnesses at the hearing called attention to the gap in the plan between objectives and proposed outcomes the argument was repeatedly made that, since some had been allowed to subdivide their land, it was not fair to restrict others from doing so.
In short, the municipality was meeting its legal obligations by providing something that resembled a plan, but political pressures from constituents in a community small enough to allow almost anyone to have a personal relationship with her or his representative on council prevented the municipality from adhering to the principles stated in the plan. In a community as small as this one, it is not necessary to imagine cases of rye or thousands of dollars changing hands in order to understand what is happening. In the absence of clear provincial planning guidelines, pressures on council are too immediate and too personal to permit genuine planning.
The situation in Springfield is very different from that in the Greater Toronto Area, described in my previous post, but the outcome is the same: it is those who stand to gain from development that largely determine the way the community will develop. Environmental concerns, and even the question of the long-term viability of a municipality's network of infrastructure and services, is likely to take a back seat.
Elsewhere I have made the case that cities and communities ought to be more involved in decision-making about social assistance, social housing and immigrant settlement. In those policy areas, there is room for more local involvement in decision-making. Land use planning is a different matter. There is too much leverage available to those who are most likely to subvert good governance. Since the growth of our cities is critically important to the national economy and the global environment, it is everyone's business. Although local interests need to be considered in land use decision-making, local decisions should be circumscribed by rules that reflect the needs of society at large.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••
You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:
Rural Municipality of Springfield. Development Plan (By-Law 98-22). Oakbank, MB: Ruraland Consulting Ltd, June, 1998.
Christopher Leo, “Urban Development: Planning Aspirations and Political Realities.” In Edmund P Fowler and David Siegel, eds., Urban Policy Issues (second edition.) Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Posted by leo-c at 5:02 PM | Comments (4)
WHY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO REGULATE CITY GROWTH
Last October I sketched out my argument that local and metropolitan governments can't meaningfully regulate urban land use because developers swing too much political weight at the local level. I pointed out, on the basis of European case studies and my own analytical work, that the position of developers is markedly different in countries where a significant amount of city planning takes place at the national level than it is in the typical North American case. We can verify that by considering the concrete reality of how land use decisions are made in Canada and the United States.
This is not easily done, because it's impossible to trace the influences that determine complicated land use decisions without careful and persistent research. The results of one such piece of research some time ago offer a revealing example. A 10-month investigation in the late 1980s by two Globe and Mail reporters deals with land development in the area north of Toronto, part of what is now known as the Greater Toronto Area - a wide ring of suburban communities that are the primary focus of growth in the region.
The investigation concluded that the provincial government adopted a hands-off stance toward a lack of urban planning that allowed private developers to control the growth of communities in the area and that the “role of citizens in the planning of their communities has been trivialized to the point where it is ignored by many municipal councils.” Specifically, the investigation found that “A small group of powerful developers... Have a near monopoly on developable land in the... area [north of Toronto] and are a factor in rising house prices.”
The Globe and Mail documented a “loan” of $80,000 that was not repaid from a developer to a company owned by an official in the region, which was followed by approval of an industrial development proposal that had been filed by the company that gave the “loan”. There were also stories of a cheque for $4,000 from a developer to a “senior municipal official” and at least two cases of envelopes containing several thousand dollars in cash delivered on behalf of a developer to a councillor.
While such stories are rarely told in as much detail as this one was, the story comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the conventions of growth politics in major metropolitan areas. In fact, it's not necessary to point to apparent corruption to see why there is very little meaningful regulation of urban growth in most North American cities. The urban studies literature is rife with examples of city councils being overawed and bamboozled or bullied and sweet-talked into decisions that can endanger both the environment and the viability of cities.
It's important to stress that there is more at stake here than conventional shock stories about influence pedalling, graft, or lack of political will. Urban growth is a critical economic issue and will necessarily play a central role in any realistic attempt to address the economic challenges and environmental problems our societies face, as I will argue in subsequent blog entries. How much longer can we afford the luxury of allowing the growth of our cities to be determined primarily by the private economic interests of those who control the development of urban land?
••••••••••••••••••••••••
You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:
Ferguson, Jock and Dawn King. 1988. Hidden money fuelling regional growth. Toronto: Globe and Mail, 2 November 1988, 1, 11.
Christopher Leo, “Urban Development: Planning Aspirations and Political Realities.” In Edmund P Fowler and David Siegel, eds., Urban Policy Issues (second edition.) Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Posted by leo-c at 4:37 PM | Comments (4)
December 18, 2007
MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE, RESCALING, AND GLOBALIZATION: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
In a globalizing world, we have to reconsider, not only the way we govern our communities, but also how their governance interacts with the governance of regions and nations, as well as global governance.
By chance or otherwise, I became interested in this topic - and researched and wrote about it - quite awhile before anyone thought of such felicitous terms as rescaling or multi-level governance. As a result a lot of useful data are buried away in publications today's researchers are unlikely to identify as relevant sources. Therefore, I offer the following bibliographic note, listing the publications in question, together with a brief note for each, explaining its relevance to rescaling, multi-level governance, or the evolving place of cities in a globalizing world. Some of these articles were published as journal articles, others as book chapters, but all are based on original research.
This annotated bibliography does not include my recent publications, such as “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy”, which is in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, 39:3 (September 2006) 481–506. In that article, and others recently published or in press, it is clear that the topic has something to do with rescaling.
MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE (RESCALING)
Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton. "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.
Made the case that the government of Canada, already in the 1980s, was finding ways of developing different federal government programs for different cities, a key characteristic of multi-level governance. The article explores the political calculations that motivate the federal government to provide unique programs for each city, instead of continuing its long-standing practice of making the same programs available to all cities.
Christopher Leo. "The State in the City: A Political Economy Perspective on Growth and Decay." In James Lightbody, ed. Canadian Metropolitics. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1995, ch 2.
As recently as the mid-1990s, the study of Canadian city politics was synonymous with the study of local government. Much of that literature left readers with the impression that the federal government had little to do with cities. This article makes the case that the way cities have grown has been absolutely central to the evolution of our national life, and that the national government has played a central role in shaping city growth.
Christopher Leo. "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.
This article finds that the strong national state presence in urban politics that is evident in continental Europe is associated, on one hand, with a political environment that tends to be unreceptive to grass-roots participation in urban development decisions and, on the other, with more state control and less clout for developers in urban development decisions. In the United States, it finds the opposite situation: a more receptive environment for grass-roots participation and developers who are better-placed to exert direct influence upon urban development. In Britain and Canada, the study finds a more complex, "mid-Atlantic" state of affairs.
Christopher Leo. “Regional Growth Management Regime: the Case of Portland, Oregon.” Journal of Urban Affairs 20 (4), 1998, 363-394.
Much of the study of urban regimes sees urban politics as a purely local matter. This article shows that the regime in Portland that was responsible for the city's growth management included interest groups with a state-wide base of support as well as the government of Oregon. In other words, local regimes may well include elements from outside the locality. It might be useful to think of this phenomenon as rescaling from below.
CITIES AND GLOBALIZATION
Christopher Leo. “The Urban Economy and the Power of the Local State: The Politics of Planning in Edmonton and Vancouver." In Frances Frisken, ed, The Changing Canadian Metropolis: Contemporary Perspectives, vol 2. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, 1994, 657-98.
A comparison of land use planning controls in Vancouver with those in Edmonton, making the case that stricter controls are easier to achieve in cities that have more clout in the global economy.
Christopher Leo. "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.
On the basis of a European-North American comparison, this article makes the case that global economic, technological and administrative pressures work in the direction of making cities around the world more similar to each other, but that a careful cross-national comparison of political practices reveals ongoing tendencies toward the preservation of national differences. In a similar vein, Paul Doremus and colleagues argue that national corporate cultures, and the regulatory apparatus that supports them, are highly resistant to global economic pressures for homogenization. This argument is convincingly set out in Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly, and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
RECENT WORK
Following is a list of some more recent articles on this topic that I wrote with help from my friends:
Christopher Leo. 2006. Deep federalism: Respecting community difference in national policy. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3): 481-506.
Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2006. National policy and community initiative: Mismanaging homelessness in a slow growth city. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15, no. 1, (supplement).
Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl. 2007. Multi-level governance: Getting the job done and respecting community difference – Three Winnipeg cases. Canadian Political Science Review 1 (2). Accessible at: http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.
Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns. 2007. Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.
Christopher Leo with Martine August, Mike Pyl and Matthew D. Rogers. Multi-level governance without municipal government. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.
Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2007. The multi-level governance of immigration and settlement: A Winnipeg case study. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.
Posted by leo-c at 7:43 PM
July 24, 2007
THE AGE OF COMMUNITY: INTRODUCTION
The dawn of the 21st Century has coincided with the dawn of the age of community. Some of my age-mates, who were adults or near-adults in the 1960s and 1970s, may not be pleased to hear that the age of community does not necessarily resemble the Zodiacal Age of Aquarius, which, we were told, was to be an era of universal brotherhood rooted in reason.
The age of community is upon us, not because of the conjunction of stars and planets, but because of political and economic changes that are overtaking us, whether we like them or not. It's important to understand those changes, because they are capable of producing drastically contrasting results, results that can be influenced by political action. The age of community can be one in which some communities prosper while others are left impoverished and powerless to control their own futures. Or it can be one in which the prosperity and economic power of some communities is shared in order to give others a serious degree of control over their own affairs.
The age of community is the subject of my current research, in which I look at the political implications for Canada of the economic changes that have brought on this age. In this first of a series dealing with findings of that research, I will look at the causes of these changes and briefly lay out some of their political implications. In subsequent instalments, I will look at some findings of my research and consider what we can learn from them about avoiding an age of community whose motto becomes "I'm all right Jack" and working toward one that bears at least some resemblance to the Aquarian age.
The technological and economic changes that are said to be driving the dawning of the age of community are variously referred to as globalization, a borderless world, glocalization, the new economy, the new world order and the post-industrial economy. The profusion of labels is indicative of the confusion of much of the thinking in the sometimes grandiloquent and vague discussions of these phenomena. It is doubly important, therefore, to be clear on just what it is we are talking about. At issue are:
1. the worldwide lowering of barriers to trade, allowing goods and services to flow more freely; and
2. the growing ease and speed, and generally declining cost, of all forms of communication, removing obstacles to the movement, not only of goods and services, but also of people and ideas. As a result, we have corporate mobility beyond anything most of us would have imagined possible a generation ago, and even greater mobility for money.
These changes bring with them at least three hard political realities. This is familiar ground to many but, again, it is important to be clear what is at issue, because it is so often discussed in vague terms. The first new reality is that the power of national governments, while it remains very real and very important, has declined noticeably, especially in governments’ ability to regulate market activity and protect social welfare. Budget stringency, free trade agreements and competitive conditions in world markets have convinced governments everywhere, regardless of whether they are conservative, liberal or social-democratic, that it is most expedient for them to lower barriers to trade and cut corporate and upper-income taxes, social programmes and funds for regional development.
This brings us to the second hard political reality. In an increasingly borderless world, local communities everywhere are less protected by national government from the consequences of international economic competition and less likely to benefit from senior-government assistance than was the case in the 1970s and earlier. At the same time, each community is much more directly in competition with every other community than ever before.
In the past, regions that benefited less from market activity often looked to national governments for job creation and regional development programs. Some of these initiatives have been taken out of the hands of government by the fact that they are deemed to be unfair trade practices in the North American Free Trade Agreement, by the World Trade Organization, or in numerous other free trade agreements around the world. Others have become victims of government cutbacks. There is much bad news in these changes, but it is not all bad news.
For example greater ease of communication is not just available to large corporations. It also makes it possible, as never before, for social movements to organize themselves on a world scale, as witness the mass anti-globalization demonstrations of recent years - which paradoxically are themselves a product of globalization. Globalization also greatly reduces many locational advantages. It is as easy to run a business dependent on high-speed communications from Winnipeg or Wuppertal - and perhaps soon from Ouagadougou or Wang-ts’ang - as from New York, London or Tokyo.
However we may appraise the advantages and disadvantages of globalization, an unavoidable outcome is that it places each community much more directly in competition with every other community than ever before. The third new reality, therefore, is that local communities — meaning municipalities of all sizes as well as metropolitan areas — have been thrown more than ever before upon their own resources. It has become the normal way of doing business for every municipality or metropolitan region to write its own economic development strategy and create an agency or agencies to implement it. Often such strategies take the form of joint ventures involving all the municipalities in a metropolitan region. Each municipality and each region has its own particular mix of resources, locational advantages and disadvantages, human capacities and shortcomings. As global market competition intensifies, it becomes more and more important for each community to assess its own potential strengths and design its economic development strategy accordingly.
If every region is doing that to its own best advantage, no two strategies will be the same. In those circumstances it becomes increasingly obvious that local initiative will become more important, and dictation from the federal government less functional. However, it makes little sense to design economic development strategies in isolation from social considerations. A welfare program makes more sense if it is co-ordinated with job creation and placement in mind, and education policies will necessarily be developed with one eye on the job market.
The age of community, therefore, is brought to us courtesy, not of our stars, but of a set of hard political and economic realities. The implications of these developments are momentous and have not been given the attention they deserve. There are at least two ways of interpreting what has happened. One is to take the view that the economic, technological, social and political changes constituting globalization have had the cumulative effect of de-centring the economy, so that a national government, which once was able to make economic and social policy on the premise that it was managing a single national economy, must now recognize that it is actually managing a series of discrete urban economies.
An alternative view is that globalization has only made more evident what has always been the case. As early as 1969, Jane Jacobs was arguing that cities are the real source of economic growth and ultimately of a society’s wealth. In 1984, she made the case that national accounts are a misleading guide to economic policy, and have perverse consequences, because they mask the crucial differences between the economies of different cities, leading to national policies that favour the dominant city and harm the economies of the rest. Similarly, a colleague and I have made the case that immigration policies have too often been based on conditions in such rapidly growing centres as Toronto and Vancouver, and have thus failed in many other cities (See the reading by Leo and Brown, listed below).
Whether we take the position that globalization has projected us into a new and different economic and political world , or join Jacobs in arguing that we have long paid a high price for our failure to appreciate the importance of city economies, the case for social and economic policies pitched to differences among urban-centred regions is compelling. Whether we like it or not, the age of community is upon us. This has fundamental implications, not only for cities and communities themselves, but also for regional and national governments. In future blog entries, I will look at some of these implications.
Want to find out more? Look for:
Christopher Leo. “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.
Warren Magnusson. 1996. The search for political space: Globalization, social movements, and the urban experience. Toronto: University of Toronto.
Ulrich Beck. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.
Jane Jacobs. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House.
Jane Jacobs. 1984. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Vintage.
Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown. (2000). “Slow growth and urban development policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs 22 (2), 193-213.
William R Barnes and Larry C Ledebur. (1998). The new regional economies: The US common market and the global economy. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Posted by leo-c at 7:13 PM
January 19, 2007
THE AGE OF COMMUNITY AND THE SECOND MODERNITY
Ulrich Beck's Power in the global age provides a carefully constructed set of concepts and a language that should prove invaluable in advancing our understanding of politics in the age of community. Pointing to economic and technological changes I discussed in a previous blog entry, he argues that the age of the nation-state has been superseded by a cosmopolitan age, which he also calls the second modernity.
His point is that, as freer trade and modern communication technologies are making it easier and easier for money, corporations, goods, people and ideas to cross national boundaries, the ability of national states to control what goes on within their borders is diminishing. In this cosmopolitan age, the only means open to both states and civil society for defending their interests is to escape national confines through international political action.
National states can do this - in fact are already making experimental forays in this direction - through such mechanisms as the World Court, the land mines treaty and the Kyoto Accord. In discussing what civil society can do, Beck focuses primarily on the ability of consumers to organize themselves internationally and launch boycotts as a deterrent against such things as unfair labour practises and civil liberties violations. Examples of such civil society initiatives would be the well-known work of Amnesty International and the Clean Clothes Campaign, dedicated to the improvement of working conditions in the global garment industry.
It is difficult to lead the way, as Beck is doing in this important book, and easy to fire pot-shots at the leader. By way of building on Beck's work, more than criticizing it, therefore, I argue that it makes more sense to think of grassroots-based global action as being community-based, rather than emanating from civil society, with the proviso that communities are not necessarily spatially based. Your neighbourhood, your city, and your metropolitan area are all communities, but so is the internet, the Jewish, Vietnamese, Islamic or Eritrean community in your city, and Amnesty International.
My reason for preferring "community" to "civil society" is that, as national boundaries become more porous, it becomes increasingly important for any community - not just civil society organizations - to organize internationally. City governments are doing this, for example through the widespread practice of twinning with other cities to promote economic co-operation.
In the face of the mobility of corporations, and of money, many communities of all kinds - including spatially-based communities and communities of interest - have been quick to pounce on globalization as a culprit, but much slower to recognize the new possibilities that globalization opens up for their defence of their own interests. In order to see the full potential, however, we need to break out of the category of "civil society" and look at the possibilities for all sorts of communities - cities, represented by their governments; neighbourhood organizations and labour unions; ethnic communities, consumer groups and more - to exploit their capacity for international organization.
In future blog entries, I want to consider both what we can learn from such initiatives as the Clean Clothes Campaign and what some of the possibilities might be for global labour organization, but I'll leave you now with a story of a Canadian-Panamanian grassroots-based political action that hints at the vast scope of possibilities for global grassroots political organization. This story appeared on the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press on May 1st, 1994.
In the 1990s Patrick Mooney of Brandon, Manitoba, was executive director of Rural Advancement Foundation International, a small organization dedicated to the conservation and sustainable use of bio-diversity, and to the socially responsible development of technologies useful to rural societies. His organization opposed the patenting of genetic material. One day he discovered on an internet site that the United States Department of Commerce had applied for world patents on the cell line of a 26-year-old Guayami Indian woman from Panama.
A cell line is a sample of cells removed from the body that can be reproduced in a laboratory and that provide an inexhaustable supply of DNA - the genetic code of the person in question. Apparently scientists believed that this woman's DNA embodied characteristics that might be used to develop a marketable means of preventing certain kinds of cancer. Obviously, the purpose of the patent was to make it possible to commercialize any discovery.
Upon learning about the patent application, Mooney contacted the Guayami General Congress in Panama City and learned that, though the woman had participated willingly in the research, she had not given permission for the patenting of her cell line. The aboriginal congress protested and, under pressure, the US government withdrew its patent application.
This is one small example of how previously powerless and isolated groups can use the technology that is associated with globalization to combine forces in pursuit of common objectives. As the internet expands and more and more people gain access to it, these opportunities will multiply. It will take imagination to discover them and a great deal of hard organizational slogging to exploit them. What's more, these possibilities will be open to all kinds of communities, not only the ones you or I might approve of. But they are there for the taking, and they offer new opportunities for overcoming the sense of powerlessness many experience in the face of global change.
Want to find out more? Look up:
Ulrich Beck. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.
Christopher Leo. “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.
Posted by leo-c at 1:33 PM
January 18, 2007
HOW SHOULD COMMUNITIES BE GOVERNED IN THE WILD WEST OF GLOBALIZATION?
In a previous blog entry, I looked at why, in the 21st Century, national governments are becoming less able to sustain the economies and the social safety nets of local communities, even as cities become more obviously central to the economy. In a related entry, I offered a community perspective on globalization's wild west, and pointed out that globalization is a two-edged sword. Corporations can amass the power and wealth that is achievable by operating on a world scale, but local communities can also operate on a world scale in forging alliances, seeking support and mounting political action.
But politics is not only an arena for conflict among contending forces, it is also a system of organized decision-making and action, a system of governance. If our world is marked by the escalating power of corporate mobility, the declining power the national state, and the growing economic importance of cities, what does that imply for governance? In a world of drastically shifting power relations, should government remain essentially as it was in the 19th Century?
A lot of thought is being given to this question. It is coming to be widely agreed that there are compelling reasons for cities to evolve economic development strategies and social supports specifically designed to deal with their own, unique set of problems and possibilities. But how? Some interesting answers are being proposed, and tried, in Canada. In this article, and a subsequent one, I take a look at them, and consider their significance.
One answer comes from the charter city movement, based in Toronto, Canada's biggest city, and an economic powerhouse that provides an apt illustration of the importance of city economies to national well-being. The charter city movement's position is spelled out in a model framework for a city charter in which the city is declared to be “an autonomous and accountable order of government”. The model charter binds the Province of Ontario, which includes Toronto, to consult the city before taking actions that affect it, allows the city to negotiate directly with the federal government, and sketches out “a dispute resolution process to be used by City and provincial officials if any future disagreements arise over the meaning of the Charter.”
Such provisions would entail an all but unthinkable revocation or voluntary renunciation of the constitutional authority of provinces over municipal affairs, but charter advocates insist, not without justification, that Toronto's wealth, and its importance to the national economy, entitles it to a bigger share of both wealth and power. Clearly, the charter city concept is grounded in a demand for radical change in intergovernmental relations.
If the charter city argument ever approaches the threshold of political viability, it will encounter resistance, not only from provincial governments unwilling to relinquish a substantial share of power, but also from many who will question the democratic bona fides or the competence of municipal councils, and from such commentators as Castells, who argues that “local... autonomy reinforces territorially dominant elites and identities, while depriving those social groups who are either not represented... or else are ghettoized and isolated.”
More significantly, it will become enmeshed in the ongoing debate over the race to the bottom. Critics will point out that if autonomous communities were to be set free to fend for themselves in an unfettered global economy, the casualties might well outnumber the successful contenders. In fact, for every commentator making the case for city charters, there are probably several expressing dismay over the effects of government cutbacks and down-loading on low-income communities and on the integrity of the social safety net, and calling for the federal government to become more involved in the setting of standards and the financing of programs. Greater centralization of power probably has more support than city charters would.
So will it be a stronger central government or greater municipal autonomy? Or is it perhaps not a question of either/or? Thomas Courchene, in a discussion that focuses primarily on federal-provincial relations, rejects the either/or position, which he calls federalism as structure, and argues that the alternative to it, federalism as process, is a Canadian tradition. In his words, instead of focussing on the distribution of formal powers, federalism as process “celebrates the creative and flexible manner in which Canadians historically... have managed their federal system.”
In a wide-ranging and perceptive essay, Courchene argues that Canadians have long practice in the regulation of the relations between federal and provincial governments by means that avoid the rigidities of constitutional provisions, in which powers are assigned irrevocably to particular levels of government, and place a premium on flexible adaptation to changing circumstances. These innovations "were the result of process, not structure, although in many cases they were tantamount to a de facto alteration of the division of powers in the federation."
Courchene's suggestion is that, within the constitutional division of powers, creative avenues of policy-making are being found that involve co-operation between governments and that allow for policies which take account of the differences among different regions of the country. This has been done by means of federal-provincial administrative arrangements that allow for numerous differences in the treatment of different provinces, and do it through negotiation and compromise, unencumbered by the rigidity of constitutional provisions.
One of the examples he cites is Medicare, a federally and provincially funded, provincially-managed, government-financed national health plan. Other examples include an arrangement whereby the federal government manages income and corporate tax collection for some provinces while others see to their own taxation, and an equalization scheme designed to reduce the economic disparities among provinces. All of these arrangements, and other, similar ones, are arrived at through negotiation and mutual agreement.
Courchene argues that these federalism-as-process arrangements have, over time, worked in the direction of growing provincial self-determination. In many ways, his analysis parallels those of commentators who advocate a re-evaluation of the place of cities in national politics. He sees growing provincial self-determination as being related to the advance of globalization. He stresses the enhanced importance of regional economies in a world of global trade and information flows. In short, Canadian federalism offers an array of examples of voluntary arrangements short of constitutional change that can secure national objectives while taking account of regional differences, and that do it without the need to confront the unsatisfactory either/or of local or regional autonomy vs. national power.
Since these arrangements are worked out in a political setting through negotiation and compromise, instead of a constitutional one, they have the added virtue of being flexible, and readily adaptable to changing circumstances. They offer a toolbox of flexible approaches to the accommodation of regional difference within a national framework.
But how does the toolbox help us deal with the relations between national governments and cities in a globalized world? If the differences between provinces justify different arrangements with the federal government for each province, is there a case to be made for similarly differential arrangements for different cities? Canada offers some relevant experience in this area as well, as I show in a later blog entry.
Want to find out more? Look for:
Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.
Thomas J. Courchene, Celebrating Flexibility: An Interpretive Essay on the Evolution of Canadian Federalism. Montreal: CD Howe Institute, 1995.
Big City Mayors' Caucus, Model Framework for a City Charter. Toronto: Federation of Canadian Municipalities discussion paper, 30 May 2002. Accessed at: http://www.canadascities.ca/background.htm, 4 July 2005.
Manuel Castells, The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Posted by leo-c at 7:34 PM
January 17, 2007
DEEP FEDERALISM: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO RESPECT COMMUNITY DIFFERENCE IN NATIONAL POLICY?
In the age of community, with corporate mobility undermining the power of national governments, is there a role for national governments in defending the interests of local communities? In my current research, I argue that there is, but that rigid enforcement of a national standard is not the appropriate way to do it, because the differences among communities ensure that what works in one may not work in another.
What is needed, rather, is a degree of flexibility that allows national standards to be met differently in different communities, and that draws on local knowledge to determine what these differences will be. In a previous entry, I outlined briefly how such flexibility is achieved in federal-provincial relations, but there is also a little-known history of such flexibility in the relations between the Canadian federal government and local communities, as well as a current practice that tries to build on that history.
I call such flexibility deep federalism, a species of federalism that extends the Canadian tradition of respect for provincial differences to the level of the local community. An early example of deep federalism was the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP), a federal government scheme aimed at the renovation of public facilities in declining neighbourhoods, which became a community development tool through the simple expedient of a requirement that a plan for neighbourhood renewal be preceded by and based upon a public participation process in each targeted neighbourhood. NIP, therefore, was structured to respect the differences, not only among cities, but also among individual neighbourhoods.
A second example, unique to Winnipeg, was the Core Area Initiative (CAI), an 11-year, tri-level arrangement for the social, economic and physical renewal of Winnipeg’s inner city, which was administered by a secretariat located in Winnipeg and responsible to all three levels of government. Such tri-level agreements have been all but institutionalized in Winnipeg, as the CAI was followed by the Winnipeg Development Agreement (WDA), and, after that, the recently concluded Winnipeg Partnership Agreement (WPA). This approach has migrated west, in the form of the Vancouver Agreement, a wide-ranging accord that drew in a large number of partners from all three levels of government, focusing their efforts on economic development, the health of residents and public safety in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Another example of deep federalism was the urban development corporation, a recurring theme in federal-provincial-local relations in Canadian cities over the past quarter century. Examples are Harbourfront in Toronto, Canada Harbour Place in Vancouver, Le vieux port de Montréal and de Québec and the Forks and North Portage corporations in Winnipeg. All of these projects were pitched to the specific circumstances of each city. To be sure, the degree of genuine local involvement in decision-making may have varied from case to case, since some were federal crown corporations, but an indisputable case of deep federalism are the Winnipeg corporations, now merged into a single entity, the Forks/North Portage Partnership. The Forks and North Portage corporations, as well as their successor organization, were and are governed by boards, with equal representation from the three levels of government.
Are these initiatives quaint relics of 1970s’ and early 1980s’ social engineering, never to be repeated? Federal government pronouncements and actions suggest otherwise. The Winnipeg Partnership Agreement (WPA), Winnipeg’s Forks/North Partnership, and the Vancouver Agreement continue to be active and, despite blemishes, have proven their worth. But there is more, as I was able to learn in the course of seven case studies I conducted in recent years. These studies, taken together, present a mixed picture of the kind we usually find when we evaluate government policy: some apparent success, some conspicuous failings, and much in between those extremes. But they also suggest an on-going federal government commitment to try to make deep federalism work.
Six of the seven case studies dealt with two policy areas – homelessness and immigration – and compared the implementation of those policies in three different communities. What these programs had in common, and what qualified them as objects of a study to test deep federalism, was that, instead of proclaiming national policies and then trying to implement them in an undifferentiated way in communities across the country, they contained provisions apparently designed to draw on community knowledge in determining what the conditions in each community were and how best to respond to them. A seventh study, the result of a separate research project, reports on a unique, municipally initiated tri-level welfare-to-work program, an abandoned and forgotten success in deep federalism.
Three of the case studies dealt with the National Homelessness Initiative (NHI), and specifically one component of that initiative, the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative (SCPI). The key provision of that initiative was a requirement that the implementation of SCPI be preceded by the formulation of a community plan, and that the terms and conditions of the program in each community be responsive to the priorities in that plan. This provision was reminiscent of the terms and conditions of NIP.
Another three studies dealt with federal-provincial agreements on immigration and settlement. These agreements allow each province to negotiate its own immigration and settlement policy with the federal government. The agreements may contain a provincial nominee program, whereby the province can nominate its own immigrants. The agreements may also provide for the establishment of local variations in settlement policy. It remains up to the province to ensure that the program is responsive to community conditions and needs, but the opportunity is there.
The purpose of the six case studies on homelessness and immigration settlement was to evaluate how well these programs lived up to their aspirations of respect for community difference in three communities manifestly very different from each other, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John. The six case studies, therefore, included a study of homelessness and housing and one of immigration and settlement in each of the three cities.
The seventh study deals with the Winnipeg Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project, a possibly unprecedented case of a tri-level program that was initiated by a municipal government. It dates to the mid-1990s, when Winnipeg was responsible for short-term social assistance, and was simultaneously burdened by a sharp increase in the welfare rolls and a substantial infrastructure deficit.
Necessity was the mother of invention as the municipal government took the initiative in the creation of a tri-level program of infrastructure renewal that doubled as job creation and training for people on welfare and was subsidized out of the money saved on welfare payments. After achieving an impressive record of success in its first year, the program was cancelled by federal government cutbacks despite the fact that it had actually saved money for the federal government.
In all seven communities local service providers and other stakeholders were involved in the programs under study. In all but one of the seven communities, we found stakeholders that not only had the expected intimate understanding of the situation in their community, but were also well versed in the literature, knowledgeable regarding experiences in other communities relevant to their area of interest, and entirely capable of organizing themselves to study options, formulate priorities, and implement them.
It is not my argument, however, that local stakeholders and officials are more astute than their federal and provincial counterparts, only that they are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, have access to much the same body of information and analysis and, in addition, have the advantage of being intimately familiar with the situation in their locality. Our studies showed that federal and provincial politicians and officials did not always perform well, nor did they always perform badly. The same was true of local politicians, officials and stakeholders.
In short, deep federalism will not produce utopia, but my research suggests that it offers serious possibilities for adapting the way we govern ourselves to the realities of the age of globalization, and of community.
To find out more about what works and what doesn't look up:
Christopher Leo, Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506
Christopher Leo and Martine August, National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15 (1) (supplement) 2006.
Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl, “Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference.” Canadian Political Science Review, 1 (2) 2007, September. Accessible at http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.
Katie Anderson and Christopher Leo, "Immigration and settlement in Saint John, New Brunswick: Community perspectives on a federal-provincial agreement." Unpublished manuscript. Accessible at http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/ChristopherLeo/ISSJecomm06-04-18.pdf.
For the details regarding the Winnipeg Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project, the munitipally-initiated, tri-level welfare-to-work scheme, see:
Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2007, accepted for publication.
For other findings on this topic, look up:
Neil Bradford, Place-based public policy: Towards a new urban and community agenda for Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2005.
Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
One of the findings of my research was that a city's growth rate is a critically important and neglected determinant of community difference. For discussions of this question, see:
Christopher Leo and Kathryn Anderson, Being Realistic about Urban Growth. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.
Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy. Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.
Posted by leo-c at 4:33 PM