Christopher Leo

July 27, 2010

THE AGE OF GOVERNANCE: SOME PROPOSED PRINCIPLES OF DEEP FEDERALISM

In my most recent blog entry, I pointed out that the way we govern ourselves has changed fundamentally in the last 20 years or so, and yet we've given little thought to the principles by which we should pursue governance - the new name for what we used to call government. The governance revolution that swept over us while we slept...

...has taken a growing number of government programs away from the direct control of government departments and, through such measures as privatization, contracting out, downloading, or provision of funding, has delegated them to companies, community or religious organizations, and non-profit or for-profit agencies.

I suggested in my previous discussion that this is not necessarily all bad. For example, the delegation of government responsibilities to a community-based organization might place a share of decision-making in the hands of people who are better-placed than any government bureaucracy to determine how best to realize, in each local context, the good intentions of government programs. Accomplishing this is what I have called deep federalism. But governance may also raise troubling questions about the private agendas of organizations acting on behalf of government, their accountability, and their responsiveness to community concerns.

These are very real concerns, that, in an age of governance, affect us all, but we not only have not established principles, we haven't really worked out a coherent way of thinking about the problems. As it happens, I have been able, courtesy of the University of Winnipeg, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to devote a significant amount of my time in the last few years to thinking about these problems.

Here's what I've come up with. I suggest we consider the following principles as possible guides for decision-making about governance. I put them forward for discussion, knowing that neither I nor anyone else has all the answers.

By preference, fund community coalitions rather than individual organizations. This proposal responds to a concern that was drawn sharply to my attention in a study of the federal government's aboriginal policies in Winnipeg. One of my findings was that the way the federal government funded aboriginal governance amounted, intentionally or otherwise, to a divide-and-conquer strategy, much, I concluded, to the detriment of the aboriginal community. (For a draft of the article, click here.)

But this is not just about aboriginal policy. The residents of any community include many whose interests are at odds. If a single organization, presumably representing a particular approach to the community's problems, gets funding to implement its policies, these may well do a disservice to others.

From the viewpoint of good governance, it makes sense to minimize community in-fighting, and provide incentives for getting different groups to work together to achieve objectives that have a broader base of community support. Making funding conditional upon program proposals that represent as broad a base of support as possible would move governance in that direction.

Set broad objectives and use a performance rather than a prescriptive approach to setting program conditions. If federal government programs are conditional upon the achievement of very specific objectives, the result is likely to force communities to dance to the government's tune. It is the exact opposite of deep federalism: Instead of programs being adapted to community circumstances, communities are forced to adapt to opinions in Ottawa.

In one of my studies, I suggested, as a remedy, the application of a performance, rather than a prescriptive, approach to the formulation of program conditions. What this spiky bit of jargon means can be easily explained with an example.

The federal government decided in the late 1990s that urban homelessness was getting out of hand, and committed itself to a program to address the problem. Responding to conditions in Toronto, the feds offered funding to community groups for such initiatives as homeless shelters and services to street people.

Those program conditions may have been defensible in Toronto, but, for reasons I discuss elsewhere, they were exactly the wrong approach for Winnipeg, where the crying need was for renovation and development of housing in older neighbourhoods. However the prescriptive conditions of the National Homelessness Initiative did not allow such programs to be funded.

The proposal I arrived at in my study of the homelessness initiative in Winnipeg was this: If the objective is to address homelessness, why not set that (performance) standard as the condition for funding and let service providers for homeless people in each community make a case for their best approach to dealing with it? The government chose instead to make detailed rules (set prescriptive standards) with the result that service providers in Winnipeg scrambled to invent programs that met government standards, instead of applying resources where they would do the most good.

(The spectacle of a homelessness program that forbids the funding of housing raises the question: What were they thinking? For an answer check out the article on Winnipeg listed at the end of this entry.)

By preference, fund programs for at least five years, conditional upon satisfactory reporting annually, and don't impose heavy administrative burdens. One of the curses of community-based organizations in the age of governance is paperwork. This became particularly evident in a study of immigration and settlement in Vancouver (see article listed below), where organizations delivering settlement services to new Canadians faced masses of paperwork in applying for funding, and near-punitive reporting requirements.

If government is serious about devolving some of its functions to community-based organizations, it must respect the fact that some of the best of these organizations rely heavily on volunteers and operate on a shoestring. If they are subject to conditions that can only be met by corporations or other large organizations, the most likely outcome is not community-based governance, but the demise of smaller community-based organizations.

Fund facilities, as opposed to programs, only when the facilities are publicly owned and controlled for the life of the facility. Here my best example is one I cited in my previous blog entry: the case of the Youth For Christ (YFC) community centre in Winnipeg. Substantial government funding is being given to this organization to develop a community centre to serve the inner city. The facility will be government-funded, but owned and operated by YFC.

Even if we take the charitable view and assume that the YFC centre will truly serve the inner city, and that the people in charge of it today have no intention of using the delivery of community services as a lever for proselytization, who is to say how that organization will behave in a decade, or two or three, when it will still be operating a community centre partly funded by taxpayers, but controlled only by its own constituency?

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For a discussion of the National Homelessness Initiative in Winnipeg, see:

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, pp. 1-21.

For more on settlement services in Vancouver, see:

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.

For a discussion of deep federalism, 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

Posted by leo-c at 6:53 PM | Comments (1)

June 21, 2010

SHOULD YOUTH FOR CHRIST BE INVOLVED IN GOVERNANCE? HOW ABOUT THE UNITED CHURCH OR NEW LIFE MINISTRIES?

The way we govern ourselves has changed fundamentally in the past 20 years, and we've barely noticed. The changes raise critical questions, which we have developed a habit of answering on a case-by-case basis, without considering the context and without being guided by principles. We need to do better than that.

In the 1980s, most government programs were run by government departments and agencies. They reported, directly or indirectly, to the government, and if citizens had a complaint about any of them, they went to their MPs, MLAs or City Councillors. It was a far from perfect world, but in general we knew who was in charge of government programs, what purposes they pursued, and who was paying the bills.

All that has changed. Today, there's a very good chance that the government, instead of running a program, will negotiate an arrangement with a company, a community organization or a religious organization whereby the government doles out some money and the company or other organization runs the program. Such arrangements between governments and civil society or business organizations are one of the reasons why the word "governance" is increasingly being substituted for "government". More than ever in the past, government is not a single entity, but a mosaic of many different arrangements for getting government work done - governance.

There is some good news in these changes, especially when the organizations running the government programs are community-based. Given favourable circumstances, organizations tied closely to a local community may be better-placed than any government bureaucracy to determine how best to realize, in each local context, the good intentions of government programs. However, the delegation of part of the work of government to other organizations also raises troubling questions of accountability.

To be sure, the government does not give out blank cheques, but the means by which accountability is maintained, and its credibility, varies from case to case. An organization may be given a specific sum of money to carry out a specified project. In such a case, the organization's accountability may be much the same as that of a government department, so that, in essence, the names have changed, but the process remains largely the same.

But if a contract is negotiated with a company, the terms of the contract may be treated as commercial information, subject to trade secrecy, and neither voters nor most of their representatives may know exactly what money is being spent and for what. Or the government may simply invest in a project that is run by a company or other organization. In that case, the organization will make commitments in return for receiving government funding, but may after that be largely free to run the program as it sees fit.

Some of these arrangements may well be a good idea. Others should ring alarm bells, but we lack an alarm system. In a political system heavy with procedural rules and principles of action, we are short of principles to help us distinguish between good governance arrangements and bad ones. My attention was directed to this issue when the City of Winnipeg agreed last February to invest $3.4 million over 15 years to help an organization called Youth For Christ, build an $11.7 million youth centre on a vacant lot in an area of the city that has been struggling, with significant investment from the aboriginal community, and with partial success, to overcome its long-standing skid-row reputation. The federal government contributed $3.2 million in infrastructure funding.

Artist's conception of the centre

As I tried to work out a way to think about this issue, I remembered that there are at least two other religious organizations active in inner city neighbourhood issues in Winnipeg: The Westminster Housing Society, which receives an annual grant from the Westminster United Church Foundation, and New Life Ministries, an evangelical inner-city church. These organizations have drawn on government funding to carry out home renovation projects, which have helped improve the security and liveability of both neighbourhoods without turning either one into an upper-income enclave.

The projects of both organizations have been flying under the radar for years, but the Youth For Christ centre raised a storm of controversy, all of which had to do with the merits of that particular project. Is it a good idea to fund a Christian mission to an aboriginal community that has barely begun to come to terms with the legacy of Christian residential schools? What else is there to fill that empty lot? Who else will reach out to inner-city youth? Will the centre serve the inner city or will its state-of-the art facilities make it a commuter facility? Or - this from an evangelical Christian - how does a religious organization justify taking government money?

The debate was chaotic and inconclusive, until the city ended it by handing out the money. One of the things that made it confusing is that it was not guided by principles that would turn our thoughts beyond the particular case to the bigger question of how we are evolving the way we govern ourselves. Let me suggest three questions which, if asked of all such initiatives in governance, might provide a starting-point toward the development of some principles:

•Is the organization in question being funded to carry out a specific, defined project, or is the government investing in facilities that will operate on the organization's own terms and may evolve in a way not originally intended?

•Is the organization likely to be responsive to the community it's being funded to work in?

•What other agendas does the organization pursue, and how do these fit or clash with the character of the community in question?

For my money, Westminster Housing Society gets a thumbs-up, because it does socially useful work that seems largely uninfluenced by its religious foundations. New Life Ministries earns my praise for a lot of good work in its neighbourhood, together with some suspicion about how that work is influenced by its mission to the neighbourhood - on balance, a somewhat hesitant assent to funding. Youth For Christ gets thumbs-down, not only because it seems questionable to me how genuinely it will serve its new neighbourhood, but also because, as citizens, we are investing money in a permanent facility over which we will have little or no long-term control.

It's not important what I think. What matters is that we all wake up to the implications of the new age of governance and start thinking seriously about the principles that should underlie it.

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For more on community-based governance, look up:

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

Neil Bradford, Place-based public policy: Towards a new urban and community agenda for Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2005.

Posted by leo-c at 2:45 PM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2009

MISMANAGING HOMELESSNESS IN A SLOW-GROWTH CITY

I'll be at the IPAC-PPM Cities and Public Policy conference next week in Toronto, reporting on some of the things I've learned about the impact of federal government policies on Winnipeg. My overall theme will be that slow-growth cities have policy problems that are very different from those of cities that are growing rapidly, and that these differences are not being given the attention they deserve.

Rapid growth generally pushes up the price of housing and multiplies the numbers of homeless people living on the street. Slow growth often depresses the price of housing and produces decayed housing, because the value of houses is not high enough to produce the necessary incentive for home renovations. People are less likely to be living on the street and more likely to be living in unsafe or inadequate housing. Two entirely different problems, and clearly different solutions are indicated.

The federal government’s National Homelessness Initiative was a response to an incident in the late 1990s, in which a homeless man froze to death on the streets of Toronto. The federal government resolved to mount a program, but having vacated the housing field some years earlier, it was determined not to get back into providing funding for housing.

The result was SCPI, the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, which, over a period of three years - our study ended in 2006 - made $23.5 million available in Winnipeg for funding such things as emergency shelters and services to street people. Winnipeg service providers argued that Winnipeg, like most slow-growth cities, had relatively small numbers of people living on the streets, but large numbers of people living in precarious housing.

They pleaded with the government to make some of its funding available for home renovation programs, and for the development of low-cost housing, but to no avail. Their only recourse was to invent programs that met federal government funding conditions, programs that they knew were not the best way to spend $23.5 million dollars.

As a result, Winnipeg service providers were forced to develop programs that might have been money well spent in Vancouver or Toronto, but that were less than optimum for Winnipeg.

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For full details on this case, take a look at:

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, pp. 1-21. To view a draft of the paper, click here.

Posted by leo-c at 5:12 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.

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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?

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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)

February 16, 2009

UN-CITYING OUR CITIES

It started as a sensible idea: workers' housing shouldn't be located next to smoke-belching heavy industry. But it has turned into an obsession with separating everything and everyone from everything and everyone else, a denial, on a massive scale, of community and of the bedrock urban reality of mutual interdependence.

Today we find ourselves with, not only separate neighbourhoods for the rich and the poor, but a fetish for spatial segregation that defies rational explanation: One area for $250,000 houses, another one for $350,000 houses, a third for $450,000 houses. Housing for old people where young people aren't welcome, family neighbourhoods where housing for the elderly isn't welcome. No housing where there is commerce, no factories (even clean ones) and no offices where there is either housing or retail trade, wide swaths of wasted land to ensure that everything is well and truly separated from everything else.

All these different forms of separation create many problems of isolation and dependency: old people who are trapped in their apartments, having to wait for rides before they can go anywhere; children who are trapped in their back yards except when their parents drive them somewhere else; parents who are forced to waste countless hours acting as chauffeurs for their children, and for workers, punishingly long commutes, often to low-wage jobs.

As usual, it is the most vulnerable who pay the heaviest price, the poor and the marginalized, who, in growing numbers, are relegated to those areas of the city that have been abandoned by everyone else. Being poor anywhere is a big problem, but it's a much bigger problem yet if you're living in a neighbourhood where there may be no good jobs, no opportunities for a good education, a neighbourhood that is likely to be terrorized by street gangs and assorted criminals. And, for good measure, the neighbourhood may be besieged by the threat of gentrification, facing residents with the prospect that they will be forced to trade their meagre refuge for absolute homelessness.

Last Saturday's Globe and Mail carried a series on one of the worst of such neighbourhoods, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The series is honest journalism that asks the right questions and doesn't shrink from the answers. Robert Matas calculates that Canadian taxpayers have paid out something on the order of $1.4 billion since 2000 without achieving any real improvements in the neighbourhood, and Gary Mason takes up the cudgels on behalf of Vancouverites who share an apparently growing determination to find a way of putting an end to the misery.

We can get some sense of the size of the challenge by reflecting on the depth of the problem. It began with a long-standing unwillingness of wealthy people to live near poor people, proceeded to a growing unwillingness of better-off people to share space with anyone less well off, and ended with a distaste for any kind of human diversity. If cities are anything, they are places where many different kinds of people live and work at close quarters and cannot avoid the reality of mutual interdependence.

We have tried to deny that reality, to un-city our cities, and blind karma has repaid us with places, like the Downtown Eastside, that are a devil's brew of abandonment, misfortune, drugs and crime. There have, of course, always been places in cities where marginalized people live, but the obsessiveness and relentlessness with which the fortunate separate themselves from those who need help is probably unique to our times.

There is no simple fix for such problems, though a stronger social housing policy could bring hope to many marginalized people, and, with changes in zoning rules, commercial areas could become excellent locations for the cost-effective creation of affordable housing. But in the long run, we all need to reflect on the folly of believing that we can, at one and the same time, enjoy the benefits of city life and separate ourselves from those who are different from us.
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Want to give some thought to this problem? Here are suggested readings:

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Peter Marcuse, "The Enclave, the Citadel and the Ghetto: What Has Changed in the Post-Fordist U.S. City". Urban Affairs Review 33 (2), pp. 233-43.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

For other discussions of land use issues, check out these links:

City Hall Take Note: Public-Private Partnerships Won't Fix This Problem

Stop Trashing Suburbs, Focus on Sprawl

Opposition to Sprawl Isn't Anti-Rural. It's Pro-Rural.

Posted by leo-c at 11:32 AM | Comments (1)

July 14, 2008

WHY WOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CUT A MONEY-MAKER?

A couple of months ago, I told the extraordinary story of how a local government tore up the federalism rule book and initiated a very promising tri-level government program for getting welfare recipients placed in good jobs. In this entry, I'd like to reflect on a curious aspect of that story that I didn't stress in my other account: The program was a conspicuous success in its first year, but the federal government cut it even though it had actually made money on it.

Russ Simmonds, The City of Winnipeg's director of social services, proposed the program in 1992, when unemployment was high, and the city was responsible for short-term welfare. Simmonds saw an opportunity to offer welfare recipients on-the-job training through an investment by all three levels of government in the restructuring and resurfacing of city roads, back lanes and sidewalks.

In a city with an infrastructure deficit that, in the mid-1990s, ran to the hundreds of millions – a crisis so serious that vehicle-sized sink-holes were appearing in the streets – the case for renewal was easily made. Simmonds's idea called for welfare recipients to do infrastructure repairs, learning on the job to become construction workers, with much of the work paid for out of money saved on welfare payments. After the Liberals came to power federally in 1993, the government agreed to fund the program for two years, with the costs to be split three ways by the three levels of government.

Since the project was designed at the local level, in partnership with the City’s Public Works Department, it was informed by awareness of the needs of both the local community and participants in the program, and it worked. Over the course of the program's first year, each level of government spent $759,266 on wages for social assistance recipients participating in the program, as well as their supervisors.

The total amount spent on wages was approximately $2.3 million. However, when calculated against the savings in social assistance accrued at each level of government, the project garnered $2.3 million worth of wages for $550,000. In fact, the federal government actually saved more in welfare costs than it spent on infrastructure renewal.

Work on the first year of the program took place over the summer of 1994 and, at the same tine, Finance Minister Paul Martin was wrestling with a massive federal government deficit by looking for cuts. One of the victims was Winnipeg's Infrastructure Renewal Program. Come again? you say. In order to save money the government cut a program that had produced savings of more than $100,000 in a year?

Exactly. How could such a thing have happened? A search for the answer would make a good Ph.D thesis topic, but if we know a little bit about how government works, it's not hard to speculate. One possible scenario: In the process of preparing next year's budget, an order goes out to government departments to prepare draft budgets reflecting cuts of X per cent. Each department goes to work looking for cuts. What to do? Cut back our own department or eliminate a budget item that gets spent at another level of government?

From the department's viewpoint, the temptation is ever-present: Down-load the cuts and let your colleagues live to fight another day. When cabinet approved the budget, it was probably not their intention to cut a money-saver - assuming that it really was a money-saver - but a government scrambling desperately to find billions will not be worrying about what, from its perspective, looks like nickels and dimes. With so much money and so many details to worry about, a perverse cut might not have been noticed at all.

There are other ways it could have happened. The point is that it can happen and it apparently did, and it is more likely to happen the bigger and more distant the government is. At the local level, such a cut would be much less likely to go unnoticed. This is only one of a number of reasons why it is important for local communities to be much more involved than they are in governance.

I'm not arguing for local autonomy. We need the power and the resources of the federal government, and sometimes we need the feds to ensure that we remain a united country, and one that treats its citizens fairly, regardless of where they live and who they are. But when it comes to ensuring that our good intentions as a nation are carried out in a manner appropriate to the different circumstances in different communities, we need a great deal more local participation.

The irony is that governance has moved in the opposite direction. Since the mid-1990s, short-term welfare has been removed from local hands and placed under the purview of the provincial government. Today, good ideas like the infrastructure renewal project are the responsibility of a government that is less likely to think of them in the first place, and more likely than local government to cut them in the unlikely event that someone does think of them.

•••••••••••••••••••••

The story of Winnpeg's infrastructure renewal project is discussed in detail and compared with other welfare-to-work and workfare schemes in Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Posted by leo-c at 7:48 PM | Comments (3)

May 1, 2008

FEDERALISM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TOP-DOWN

In Canada, the mention of federalism generally puts us in mind of federal government initiatives that are carried out in co-operation with provincial and territorial governments. Sometimes provincial initiative is also a factor, especially in recent years, since the creation of the Council of the Federation, an association of provincial and territorial premiers that aims "to play a leadership role in revitalizing the Canadian federation and building a more constructive and cooperative federal system."

We are less likely to think in terms of municipal or community initiative, but community initiative in intergovernmental relations is a current reality, in fact one that has been with us for some time, though it remains an exception to the rule of top-down government. In the late 1960s, in the most epic of Canada’s battles over plans for urban expressways, citizens opposing the Spadina Expressway made a strategic decision to bypass Metropolitan Toronto Council and take their case to the Ontario Municipal Board and the provincial cabinet, and it was the cabinet that gave them their victory.

Other examples could be cited, but the most striking today are the Toronto-based City Charter Movement, and the drive for a “new deal for cities”, originally spearheaded by former Winnipeg Mayor Glen Murray, which led to an undertaking by the federal government to share gasoline tax revenues with cities and communities. In Toronto, a mood of local activism that is associated with the Charter City Movement and the new deal has produced rhetoric that verges on dismissiveness toward other levels of government. For example, commenting on local initiatives in the area of immigration and settlement, Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc said:

"The legislative framework that allows local government to exist is so broad you really have a lot of scope for whatever you want to do. Just pick a different piece of legislation or you just do it because there’s a legislative vacuum at the provincial level."

On the same topic, Toronto Councillor Kyle Rae suggested, "a city that wants to move into an uncharted sector will get away with it because I think the provincial government is inadequate or inept at managing their responsibility.”

These statements express a mood of local activism that contrasts sharply with a municipal tradition marked by submissiveness to senior governments and preoccupation with routine administrative matters. A similar mood has been evident in recent Vancouver politics, where a local initiative to establish North America’s first legal safe drug injection site drew funding from all three levels of government. In another Vancouver initiative, shrewd city politicians found a way of using an Olympic bid to extract social housing and downtown revitalization funding from an otherwise parsimonious provincial government.

In the March 2008 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, a colleague and I report on another municipal initiative, a rare case in which a municipal government formulated a proposal for a tri-level government programme and initiated negotiations that led to its implementation. To this day, the initiative stands as an example of opportunities we may be missing because so often we fail to draw on local knowledge in formulating and implementing national policy.

The Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project was a voluntary program, originally intended as a large-scale initiative that would have employed more than a thousand people, but fiscal pressures reduced the scope to that of a demonstration. Even the demonstration, however, provides evidence of the feasibility and potential effectiveness of the kind of tri-level initiative first proposed in 1992 by Winnipeg’s Social Services department.

Since the project was designed at the local level, in partnership with the City’s Public Works Department, it was informed by awareness of the needs of both the local community and participants in the program. In a city with an infrastructure deficit that, in the mid-1990s ran to the hundreds of millions – an infrastructure crisis so serious that vehicle-sized sink-holes were appearing in the streets – the case for infrastructure renewal was easy to make.

Simmonds presented his idea for the project in a meeting with the federal Liberal caucus before they came to power in 1993. In this meeting, he argued that all three levels of government could potentially save on social assistance by investing money, to be spent on wages and training, in the restructuring and resurfacing of city roads, back lanes and sidewalks. When the Liberals came to power, they expressed interest in financing the program. After securing provincial funding, Simmonds took the proposal to city council, and received approval to proceed.

Over the course of implementation, each level of government spent $759,266 on wages for social assistance recipients participating in the programme, as well as their supervisors. The gross amount spent on wages was approximately $2.3 million. However, when calculated against the savings in social assistance money accrued at each level of government, the project garnered $2.3 million worth of wages for $550,000. In fact, the federal government actually saved more in welfare costs than it spent on infrastructure renewal.

The reported outcomes of the project were surprisingly positive, perhaps in part because, in a time of high unemployment, a relatively large number of capable workers were receiving social benefits. The municipal government’s initiative targeted young household heads, people more likely to succeed than many welfare recipients, whose success would benefit whole families. The work took place over the summer of 1994, and, by the end of the summer, program participants were working at the speed of other city crews and producing a finished product that met regular city standards. Some reports suggested that the former welfare recipients, highly motivated to give the lie to stereotypes about welfare recipients, actually worked to a higher standard than city employees. As a result of the project, participants gained useful training, and were able to put recent employment on their resumes.

Participants earned union wages – $10.41 an hour, or $832.80 bi-weekly. The fact that the program strategically targeted heads of large households might have been thought an obstacle to success, since a family of four on welfare would have received the equivalent of approximately $9.50 an hour, and a family of five more than $11 an hour. Thus some of the workers were choosing jobs despite the fact that welfare would have paid approximately as well, even after taking into account a city income supplement designed to maintain low-wage workers’ incentive to secure and retain employment.

Here again high unemployment may have contributed to success because, especially in adverse labour market conditions, gaps in employment history look bad for future employment. Whatever the reasons, telephones at the City of Winnipeg were ringing incessantly with social assistance recipients doing everything possible to get into the program.

One of the main issues involved in securing funding for many of these programs was the fact that the City paid union wages. The Progressive Conservative provincial government took the view that this was too much to be paying social assistance recipients, despite the fact that it was actually saving them money. A city official reported that he and his colleagues explained repeatedly, but to no avail, that the province was saving money, not only on infrastructure and other needed projects, but also by reducing the financial and social costs of welfare dependency. The benefits of this programme went well beyond the easy-to-measure cost savings, city social services officials argued.

The decision to favour heads of households for the program was made in the knowledge that the whole family would benefit. A working parent becomes a positive role model for the children as they see him or her leaving for work in the morning. The self-confidence and self-respect of the whole family grows, replacing the feelings of desperation usually associated with receiving social assistance. Finally, because the programme was generated at the civic level, it responded to community priorities and provided training known to lead to prospects for continued employment in future.

In follow-up interviews with program participants, Simmonds discovered that their experiences with federal government employment programs connected with employment insurance (EI) had contrasted sharply with their favourable experience in the city’s infrastructure programme. Not one of them had been given any sort of opportunity for training while on EI. Those who inquired about academic upgrading or training activities were told to wait until they were contacted. Not one of them reported having been contacted. Almost all ended up back on welfare when their EI expired, indicating a serious problem with the nature of EI delivery.

In fairness to EI officials, they lacked the resources of the City of Winnipeg, which was in a position, not only to identify available job opportunities, but to identify needs, secure funds for meeting them, and then make the jobs available, all with a view to producing training and job opportunities for people on the welfare rolls. In putting people on welfare together with job opportunities, a local government is clearly in a more advantageous position than a federal agency.

It is less remarkable that Simmonds was able to accomplish what he did – though obviously it was no mean feat – than that so little has been done to take advantage of the opportunity revealed by his pioneering work. Obviously, official recognition that local governments can play an important role in ensuring the effective delivery of federal and provincial programmes – and in the process, make an important contribution to community economic development – has been slow in coming.

Why did municipal government programs succeed so impressively, while both provincial and community-driven projects had a spottier record? The answer, apparently, is that no organization is better placed than a municipal government to identify both available job opportunities and community needs, secure funds for meeting them, and then make the jobs available. In addition, Winnipeg, in the 1980s and 1990s – because of its responsibility for short-term welfare – was also well placed to identify people who could benefit from the programs and match them with appropriate opportunities.

Despite those advantages, the municipal government did not act on its own. The infrastructure renewal program relied on funding from senior governments. Indeed, what Smith and Stewart call whole-of-government programming (see article listed below) is critical to the success of locally driven welfare-to-work because it is the senior levels of government that are garnering the savings on welfare payments. Winnipeg’s experience suggests that programs designed to provide on-the-job training for welfare recipients are feasible and can deliver important benefits to some proportion of social assistance recipients, to the wider community, and to the taxpayer, but that intergovernmental co-operation is essential to its success.

Can we learn from these successes today? Since the main trend in social welfare is its devolution upward from municipal government, the scope for a repetition of the experiences of the 1990s is narrowing, for the time being at least. But even if such municipal initiatives as those of the Winnipeg Department of Social Services are not repeated, the development of locally driven welfare-to-work schemes upon the initiative of the senior governments should still be an option. There is no obvious reason why it would not be possible for the federal government and provincial governments to conclude agreements to finance local initiatives that can be demonstrated to provide good jobs and useful job training. Senior governments could, if they wished, limit the amount of their funding to an amount equal to their savings on welfare.

The senior governments could put out calls for proposals from municipal governments, as well as community groups, and a federal-provincial secretariat could vet the proposals, funding the ones that provided decent jobs, useful job training and community benefits. Senior governments would be providing only an advance on money they would save and the community, welfare recipients, and their families would benefit immediately. Taxpayers would benefit as well, from the completion of projects at a discount, and from the longer-term savings as social service recipients attained financial independence. It is a policy idea with an already established record of success, and there is no reason to think that it could not work again, given the political will to make it happen.

••••••••••••••••••••

The story of Winnpeg's infrastructure renewal project is discussed in detail and compared with other welfare-to-work and workfare schemes in Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

The Spadina Expressway battle is detailed in Christopher Leo, The Politics of Urban Development: Canadian Urban Expressway Disputes. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1977.

Kristin Good discusses local activism in Toronto in “Multicultural Democracy in the City: Explaining Municipal Responsiveness to Immigrants and Ethno-cultural Minorities.” PhD thesis. University of Toronto, 2006, chapter 4.

Patrick Smith and Kennedy Stewart look at Vancouver local activism in “Local Whole-of-Government Policymaking in Vancouver: Beavers, Cats and the Mushy Middle Thesis.” In Municipal-Federal-Provincial relations in Canada,, Robert Young and Christian Leuprecht, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

For more on recent trends in federalism and multi-level governance, see:

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3) (September, 2006): 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl, “Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference.” Canadian Political Science Review, 1 (2) 2007, September. Accessable at http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.

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, pp. 1-21.

Christopher Leo with Susan Mulligan, “City Politics: Globalization and Community Democracy”, in Joan Grace and Byron Sheldrick, Canadian Politics: Critical Reflections. Toronto: Pearson, 2006.

Posted by leo-c at 11:22 AM

October 21, 2007

HOW IS GLOBAL POLITICAL ACTION ORGANIZED? A LIST FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

In the age of globalization, there are two distinct ways of giving voice to, and putting a push behind, your political views. One is through the time-honoured rules of national politics - elections, polls, and petitions to government. Many of us have become disillusioned with that way of doing politics, at least in part because corporations don't play by those rules unless it suits their convenience.

Thanks to a plethora of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, and to the ease of communication in the 21st Century, corporations, or anyone that wields serious financial power, can circumvent the old rules, by moving their activities or their money to countries more favourably inclined toward them. However, as I've argued in previous posts, the rest of us can play the same game.

We've watched as the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) failed in the face of massive demonstrations. In Europe, after storms of angry public reaction, Shell Oil backed away from plans to sink an oil storage facility into the sea and Monsanto re-thought its venture into genetically modified seeds. Noreena Hertz (cited at the end of an earlier entry) sees this kind of consumer power as a major weapon for ordinary people in countering the excesses of globally mobile corporate and financial power. I have my doubts.

The past experiences of labour and other social movements suggests that politics is not quite that easy. It seems likely that the main long-term benefit of such highly public events as the anti-MAI demonstrations will be to shape public opinion - and not necessarily always in favour of protesters. Genuine, lasting improvement in stewardship of the environment, protection of human rights, improvement of labour standards and reduction of poverty will probably require a great deal of research, networking, education, and long-term commitment.

For my money, the most likely vehicles for such political action are globally networked non-government organizations (NGOs), labour organizations, cities and communities, each pursuing a well-defined set of issues, and working out carefully-considered political strategies. Their success or failure will will turn on the quality of their research, the shrewdness of their strategies, and their ability to mobilize broad public support.

Those of us who study politics have generally looked at the work of these NGOs in a fragmented way, by issue area - environmental groups, human rights organizations, and the like - or as factors in the politics of particular countries. We need to start thinking of them collectively as components of what Ulrich Beck (cited at the end of an earlier entry) calls the second modernity, as a political force in their own right, one that operates in whole or in large part outside the arena of the nation-state.

I don't know how many such organizations there are, but I've started to make a collection of the web sites of any I can think of or find out about for a course I'm teaching next term. The list is reproduced below, and this blog entry is open to comments. In the first couple of weeks, the response, both in the comments section, and by e-mail to me, has been substantial and encouraging, and has helped me to improve the list. Warm thanks to everyone who took the trouble to write.

ENVIRONMENT

David Suzuki Foundation
Climate Action Network
Diversitas
Forests without Borders
Ocean Conservancy
Natural Resources Defense Council
Slow Food International
Gene Campaign
Global Commons Institute
Basel Action Network (BAN)
Rainforest Action Network
Rainforest Rescue
World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund)
Care for the Wild
ChevronToxico: Campaign to hold Chevron Texaco accountable for toxic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon/
Sierra Club
Wildlife Direct
Navdanya
Équiterre
Greenpeace
Sea Shepherd Society
The Nature Conservancy
Global Response
Worldwatch Institute
Friends of the Earth
IUCN (World Conservation Union)
ETC (Research and political action on biotechnology and nanotechnology issues)
Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society

POVERTY

Oxfam
Medecins sans frontieres (Apologies to my Francophone readers for the absence of accents. Apparently the World Wide Web objects to them, at least in lower case.)
Farm Radio International
Mennonite Central Committee
American Jewish World Service
Christian Aid
Help Lesotho
Partners in Health
Free the Children
BRAC: Alleviation of Poverty and Empowerment of the Poor
Care Canada (Care has different web sites for different countries that, curiously, aren't linked together. For example Care USA, which represents itself as being beyond nationality; Care UK, and Care International Deutschland.)
Grameen Foundation
CGAP: Advancing Financial Access for the World's Poor
Micro-credit Summit Campaign
Results
Mennonite Economic Development Associates
Central Asia Institute
Turquoise Mountain
Development and Peace
Inter Pares
World Vision
Save the Children
Concern Worldwide (US)
American Refugee Committee
Habitat for Humanity
Practical Action

WOMEN'S ISSUES

Women for Women
DAWN
SAFER: Social Aid for the Elimination of Rape
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-International
Central Asia Institute

LABOUR ISSUES

Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights
Workers Uniting
International Trade Union Confederation
Global Unions
Alta Gracia: A global company that supports fair wages and working conditions
LabourStart
Education International
Building and Wood Workers' International
International Federation of Journalists
International Metalworkers' Federation
International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation
International Transport Workers' Federation
IUF (Food, farm and hotel workers)
Public Services International
Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD
UNI (Global union for skills and services)
Workers' Rights Consortium
National Labor Committee
Clean Clothes Campaign

HUMAN RIGHTS

International Crisis Group
Amnesty International
Reporters Without Borders
Under the Same Sun: Support for people with albinism
Human Rights Watch
Inuit Circumpolar Council
International Lesbian and Gay Association
ECPAT International (Action against child sexual exploitation)
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
Disability Rights Promotion International
Project Ploughshares
Anti-Slavery International

HEALTH

Stephen Lewis Foundation: Turning the Tide of AIDS in Africa

GOOD GOVERNMENT/GOVERNANCE

Open Society Institute
Avaaz
City Mayors
Oilwatch
CorpWatch
Transparency International
International Union of Local Authorities

COMMUNITY ACTION

New Rules Project
The Urban Conservancy
Spot.Us: Community-based journalism
E-Democracy
Community Problem Solving
Working Smarter in Community Development
The Citizens' Handbook

CONSUMER ADVOCACY

NCRC Global Fair Banking Initiative
Consumer Action

FREE/FAIR TRADE

Attac
The Fairtrade Foundation
International Network for Cultural Diversity
Bristol Fairtrade Network
Integrate This!
WTO Public Forum 2007

INTEGRATIVE (Dealing with a range of issues)

Change.org
Women for Women
La Via Campesina
Greenpeace Energy Revolution Now
Global Witness
Global Development Research Centre
Policy Innovations
World Social Forum
Aga Khan Development Network
Slow Food International
American Friends Service Committee
Future Generations Canada

•••••••••••••••••••••••
Notes: The main criterion for inclusion in the list is that the organization pursue social or political (as opposed to corporate or personal) objectives as a primary focus. A second criterion is that the objectives in question must include a quest for social or political change. (For example, food banks or organizations engaging in disaster relief - however worthy - would not qualify for the list unless their activities included attempts to address the causes of the distress they worked to relieve.) Inclusion in the list doesn't imply my endorsement. The list obviously represents a variety of points on the political spectrum, and part of its potential instructional value is that it can open discussion regarding these differences.

My list includes some faith-based NGOs, and I may have missed some of these. I would like to include any organization whose primary focus is social or political, rather than religious, regardless of whether it is backed by a religious organization. For example, I've included the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, as well as Development and Peace - which is sponsored by the Canadian Catholic Church - because I know they focus on social and political issues in a manner that is not necessarily tied in with missionary work or other purely religious pursuits. I'm open to advice on other such organizations.

A variety of unsavoury groups, such as racist organizations, also pursue social and political change. I'm not including them in a list that, for the moment, is intended primarily for instructional purposes, but, from an analytical perspective, they need to be considered.

Posted by leo-c at 3:52 PM | Comments (8)

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

July 23, 2007

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON POLITICS?

What's the impact of globalization on politics? Many commentators pronounce on this complex and multi-faceted topic with great confidence, but an overview of the literature suggests that we are still struggling to understand it. An obvious characteristic of globalization is that money, goods and manufacturing have become far more mobile than they once were, with the result that corporations are freer than ever to move, and finance to invest, wherever they choose.

Therefore, national governments are less able to control the activities of mobile businesses than in the past, while corporations and finance are in a better position to dictate to national governments. They do this by relocating their activities to - and buying the currencies of - states whose policies they approve and abandoning, or threatening to abandon, the rest.

So what are the political implications of this fundamental shift in the balance of power between international business and governments? Susan Strange argues that the state is in retreat. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri invoke a very different conceptual framework to conclude, somewhat similarly, that sovereignty is migrating away from the state. Noreena Hertz and George Monbiot warn of the commanding power of corporations over the state, but Paul Doremus and his colleagues emphasize the continuing importance of the state and political culture. (See citations below.)

Yet another perspective comes from Thomas L. Friedman, who, in the lucid, discursive, but conceptually loose style characteristic of excellent journalism, sees the politics of globalization as consisting of a tension between the struggle for prosperity - which requires an embrace of globalization - and the struggle to preserve community values. Taken together, all of these arguments present us with both direct contradictions between various commentators and important differences among ideological allies.

Globalization is also associated, a bit more loosely, with the "hollowing-out of the state", invoked by Bob Jessop and many imitators and acolytes. In this view of political change, the national state is not so much being subordinated or sidelined as acting on its own, in response to complex stimuli, to reduce the scope of its control over society through privatization, contracting out of government work, creation of semi-independent government agencies, and delegation to other levels of government. Ian Holliday, for his part, denies that these changes add up to an actual reduction in the capacity of the national state. (All the authors I mention in this entry are cited below.)

If we take all these accounts together, we are left with a great deal of puzzlement and little real clarity. Where to turn? In my most recent round of tussles with the politics of globalization - I'm teaching a course entitled Globalization and Community Democracy next year - I've found Ulrich Beck's Power in the Global Age particularly helpful. He deals with the problem of the influence of globalization on politics by setting up a dichotomy between the era preceding the current one, and the one now dawning. He characterizes the first era quite simply as the first modernity, a time in which we all more or less played by the rules of national sovereignty: the writ of national governments ran within their boundaries and there they could do as they pleased. Within those boundaries, corporate and civil society were subject to the authority of the national state.

In the current era, the second modernity, the power represented by national sovereignty can be evaded thanks to the 21st Century's freer flow of money, ideas, goods and people. By this point, you may well be asking, "So, what's new?" The novelty of Beck's argument is that he does not fall into the trap of arguing that the second modernity simply supersedes the first - which would lead to the conclusion that national sovereignty is a thing of the past. Rather, he sees the advent of the second modernity signalling the beginning a "meta-game" of power, in which national power continues to play an important role, and the rules of national sovereignty remain operative, while, at the same time, the players are now able to play by the free-wheeling rules of the second modernity if they choose.

He points out that so far, the primary player in the meta-game has been corporate capital, and notes that capital and its political allies would like us to think that that is all there is to globalization - that globalization puts us all in the position of being forced to accept the hegemony of capital. Or, in his words, "The neo-liberal agenda is an attempt to capture the momentary historical gains of globally and politically mobile capital and fix them institutionally." (p. 5) The notion that national sovereignty is a thing of the past is implicit or explicit in the arguments of such commentators as Strange, Monbiot, Hertz, and Hardt and Negri.

But, in Beck's conceptual universe, anyone - not only capital and finance, but civil society, and even national states themselves - can play the meta-game. At this point, I take leave of Beck's argument, not only because I do not altogether buy it, but also because he may not wish to have my ruminations attributed to him. In my version of Beck's argument - which may not differ greatly from his, at least initially - the first modernity includes, not only national sovereignty, but also a conventional division of powers among levels of government, with municipal government subordinate to senior governments.

The national government is in a position to defend local communities from a variety of economic exigencies through such measures as tariffs to protect local industries from international competition, as well as a more or less unlimited ability to provide regulatory and financial support to industries, regions and communities in the form of such measures as subsidies to agriculture and industry and regional development programs. In turn, industry, communities, and regional governments are severely constrained by the national state's rules. (We must be careful not to overstate this point, because globalization as such is not a new phenomenon. Business and politics have operated at a global scale at least since the beginning of the colonial era, and one could make out a reasonable case that Ghengis Khan was a globalizer. What is new, and has led to the second modernity, is the extent to which and the speed with which goods, people, money and ideas can move.)

In the second modernity, the national state is still a going concern, wields great power and commands vast resources, but the rule book of national sovereignty no longer necessarily governs what the players may and may not do. However, it is not only corporations and finance that can ignore it. Our imaginations are the only limit.

National governments can extend their sovereignty, internationally through such measures as the land mines treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Accord. With sovereignty no longer unbreachable, tyrants can be deprived of a restful sleep, as Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator discovered when he was arrested in London, and as a succession of former leaders learned upon being brought to trial for genocide before the ICC.

As well, national governments have for some time been extending their sovereignty locally. Already in 1990, a colleague, Robert Fenton, and I pointed out that the Canadian government had moved away from programs that were national in scope to such measures as urban development corporations, and tri-level government agreements, in which particular communities were targeted by programs unique to them. This trend has continued, as I have shown in a 2006 article, and the Canadian government has not been alone in promoting it. (Both articles are cited below.)

But the second modernity is not only for corporations and national governments. Speed and ease of communication, together with the growing legitimacy of action that operates outside the nation-state system, opens up new possibilities for municipal governments, labour unions, consumer groups and any number of other grassroots organizations that can benefit from international networking and action.

It is well understood that these possibilities exist, but it seems likely that there are further possibilities for far more effective action than we have seen so far. The global reach of major corporations is their obvious strength, but also a weakness, in that the brands that represent them are highly vulnerable to bad publicity. This opens possibilities for organizations that seek better working conditions for workers or fairer terms of trade for producers. Some work has been done along these lines, for example by the Clean Clothes campaign, but much grassroots anti-globalization activity has amounted to little more than ineffectual railing against big names. Really effective action requires the specific identification of bad employers and other instances of exploitative practices, not just targeting high-profile brand names, like Nike or Starbucks.

If labour unions can break free of old habits of thought and ossified organizational structures, they as well can exploit the vulnerability of global brands and they can also find more effective ways to organize internationally, so that workers in one part of the world can support their more vulnerable fellow workers elsewhere.

Likewise, many municipal governments have developed their own foreign policies, in the form of twinning arrangements with cities around the world to promote mutual economic development, to name only one example. Ease of worldwide communication, and the diminution of cultural barriers that comes from more communication has also opened, literally, a world of new possibilities for the venerable International Association of Local Authorities.

In short, Beck's concept of the meta-game opens the way to a much more satisfactory account of the politics of globalization than we can gain from either panegyrics to the wonders of globalization or conspiratorial accounts of corporate dominance. Beck's formulation tells us that we are witnessing neither the demise of the nation-state, nor its total subordination to international capital. The nation-state is still there, it still wields power, it commands massive resources, and the political games that are played by nation-state rules are still enormously significant.

At the same time, Beck's account of the political arena of the second modernity challenges communities, neighbourhoods, cities, interest groups, labour unions - anyone who can get her hands on a computer with an internet connection - to think about how they might be better represented outside of the state-system rules. The nation-state is no longer the only game in town, as it were, and the sooner the rest of the world catches up with corporations and financial organizations that know how to play the other game, the sooner a measure of balance will be restored to politics.

If we accept Beck's conception, it becomes clear that the meta-game that began with the advent of the second modernity is in its early stages. Small wonder we are still struggling to understand the politics of globalization. We are far from knowing where it will take us.

There is a great deal to read on this subject. Here are a few readings I recommend.

Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. (For a very good, concise summary of Beck's main arguments, take a look at Geoffrey Fox's blog, Literature & Society.)

Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. London: Arrow Books, 2002.

George Monbiot, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. London: Pan, 2001.

Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

Bob Jessop, “Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy.” Studies in Political Economy 40: 7–39 (1993).

Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Ian Holliday, "Is the British State Hollowing Out?" The Political Quarterly 71 (2) (2000), 167–176.

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3) 2006, 481-506.

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.

Posted by leo-c at 4:51 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