Christopher Leo: Multi-level governance Archives

August 29, 2010

THE MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE OF URBAN GROWTH: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON

Last May, I sketched out an idea for a research project that would look at what senior governments could do to ensure that those who make decisions about the growth of North American cities do a better job of respecting the environment. That idea has now matured into a research proposal. In this entry, I'll summarize the proposal and provide a link to the full proposal.

Here's the summary:

My proposed research will shed new light on a major, but much-neglected question: What can we learn from Europe and each other about how best to achieve sustainable growth in North American cities?

Most students of city development agree that the way our cities grow and change has a major impact on the environment. An environmentally friendly city is one that is relatively compact, with ready access to fast and convenient public transportation, and with houses, shopping and public facilities located so that that residents and workers can get around easily without having to rely mainly on automobiles.

The priorities of land developers and consumers often fail to reflect these concerns. In North America, the job of balancing environmental considerations against the demands of land developers and consumers falls largely to municipal councils and most councils find it very difficult to achieve a balance that is favourable to the environment.

Many fail repeatedly because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests. Finding an approach to urban growth that more effectively balances the interests of development companies and immediate consumer demands against a wider, longer-term public interest in a sustainable environment will be a major policy challenge in the decades to come.

If local governments cannot control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Although economic and consumer pressures favouring urban sprawl are world-wide, Europe has, in general, been more successful in planning compact cities, well-served by public transportation, than North America. One of the reasons, as I learned in a previous study - the first one listed below - is that land development interests exercise a great deal of influence in local politics, but are relatively small players at the national level. The sustainability of European cities benefits from the fact that many urban development regulations are laid down by national governments.

Though planning scholars are aware that there are significant differences between European and North American urban planning practices, there have been few careful, comparative studies. Political scientists understand the value of such studies, as witness the large political science literature on comparative European, North American and developing-world national politics, and another significant literature embodying cross-national comparisons of other aspects of city politics.

Though the management of urban growth offers similar opportunities to learn by comparing and contrasting the planning and development practices of European and North American cities, scholars concerned with urban development politics and policy have done little to develop those fields of study. My research will address that gap, with a three-city comparative case study of the multilevel governance of urban growth in three jurisdictions that have tried, to some degree, to centralize the management of urban growth: Metropolitan Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Greater Hamburg.

I will focus my research on three questions: How is the development of new subdivisions managed? What is the overall condition of municipal infrastructure? How well served by public transit is the urban area? Answers to these seemingly simple questions will throw up a wealth of political and administrative complexities, but they are sufficiently focused to keep the overall comparison both meaningful and manageable.

•••••••••••••

The study in which I pointed out the advantages of having more urban planning authority at higher levels of government was:

Christopher Leo, "City politics in an era of globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing urban regime theory: Regulating local government in a global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The study that focused my attention on the significance for urban planning of state government intervention was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

To look at the full proposal and the references click here and here.

Posted by leo-c at 12:27 PM

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?

••••••••••••••••••

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.

••••••••••••••••••

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)

May 19, 2010

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, WHO CAN? A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

In both Canada and the United States, we have largely left urban growth issues to local governments, and many local governments have failed to manage them. Many will never succeed because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests.

As a result, the growth of our cities is, in practice, primarily responsive to the interests of developers. These interests are frequently at odds with the considerations that bear on preservation of the environment, maintenance of agriculture, an efficient infrastructure network and a transportation system that serves the population as a whole.

Therefore, in a series of posts on the multi-level governance of land use I've argued that:

• In urban growth policy, unlike many other policy domains, too much local control is a recipe for bad policy.

• This applies to major metropolitan areas and semi-rural, urbanizing communities alike.

• The reduction of local control over urban growth - in other words, centralization of power - is entirely justifiable because urban growth is every bit as much a national and global issue as it is a local one.

If local governments can't control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Despite a lot of loose talk in the literature about sprawl being a global phenomenon, Europe has, in general, been more successful at land use planning than North America, and, as I argued in the first of this series of posts, a major reason is that national land use regulations lay down rules that are not as easily revoked by the political clout of developers.

Centralized land use regulation along the lines of the British Planning Policy Guidance Notes and Statements, or the German Raumordnungsgesetz (see article by Andreas Schultze Baing, listed below), are not likely to be an option in North America, but there have been serious attempts at provincial or state government intervention, and this could be a reasonable substitute for European-style national planning. In addition, both senior levels of government can and do attack land use issues in a more piecemeal manner, through such measures as environmental regulations, or conditional funding of transportation facilities.

As a result of these reflections, I am hoping to fund a three-city, international comparative case study to take a closer look at the alternatives that might be available to governments wishing, at long last, to address the issue of urban growth in a serious way. The three cities I have chosen are Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Hamburg. Here's why:

Portland. The best-known, and probably most vigorously pursued, senior-government intervention in the US is that of Oregon, which is usually identified with Portland's growth boundary, but which in fact goes well beyond the establishment of an urban growth limit line, encompassing a panoply of rules governing urban growth and development. I learned a lot about how the Oregon system works when I did a case study of the politics of growth management in Portland in 1995, but since then there's been a lot of water under Portland's Burnside Bridge, so it's time for another look.

The Greater Toronto Area. In 2005, in Canada, Ontario legislated a greenbelt designed to hem in the expansion of the Greater Toronto Area, to preserve agriculture, and to conserve natural areas. In Toronto, meanwhile, a variety of measures have been undertaken to promote densification of the city; the reversal of some of the separation of residential from commercial development that has been such a troubled legacy of modernist planning; and the development of the transit system. In practice, therefore, the Greater Toronto Area is governed by a growth management regime that has much in common with Oregon's system.

Hamburg. The European case in my three-city comparison will be Hamburg, which I have chosen because it exhibits some of the complexities that have made growth management in North American metropolitan regions complicated: multiple municipalities, sprawling across three Länder: Hamburg itself, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

A systematic comparison of how the growth of cities is managed, considering both political and administrative dimensions of the problem, in Europe, in the Greater Toronto Area and in Portland should make it possible to gain an overview of problems and possible solutions to them.

Specifically, the objective of my research will be a cross-national comparison of different systems of land use regulation. The topic is potentially vast, so it is very important to limit the research in such a way as to keep it manageable and truly comparative. At the same time it has to be broad enough to permit a meaningful look at the question of whether growth is being managed effectively. I propose the following research questions, one of which bears on procedure, with the other two addressing results:

1. What political and administrative steps are taken, and what rules are applied, in deciding on the location and structure of new subdivisions?

2. What is the condition of infrastructure (roads, public transportation facilities and underground municipal services) throughout the urban area?

3. How well-served by public transit is the urban area?

Answers to these questions, with all the complexities they will bring to the surface, should provide a reasonable test of the effectiveness of growth management in these three regions. At the same time they will provide insights into the political, administrative, and regulatory sources of success and failure.

••••••••••••••

A brief, useful comparison of British and German land use regulatory regimes can be found in:

Andreas Schultze Baing, "Containing Urban Sprawl? Comparing Brownfield Reuse Policies in England and Germany". International Planning Studies 15 (1), 25–35.

The article in which I originally argued that centralized city planning reduces the clout of developers is:

Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The major publication recording the results of my 1995 research in Portland, Oregon, was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Here are some other articles I have published on multi-level governance:

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

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.

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 Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009.

Richard Lennon and Christopher Leo, “Metropolitan Growth and Municipal Boundaries: Problems and Proposed Solutions.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 24 (Fall), 2001, 77-104.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.

Christopher Leo, with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is Urban Sprawl Back on the Political Agenda? Local Growth Control, Regional Growth Management and Politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.

Christopher Leo, "Global Change and Local Politics: Economic Decline and the Local Regime in Edmonton." Journal of Urban Affairs, 17 (3), 1995, 277-99.

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 2:45 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2010

CASE STUDIES CAN PRODUCE THEORETICAL ADVANCES: HERE'S AN EXAMPLE

Case studies have unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigations of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. It is argued that the case study is, at best, a preliminary step, in that it may generate hypotheses that can later be tested using such “more reliable” methods as standardized questionnaires or statistical data. In the study of politics, however, that sequence of research initiatives may well work better in reverse.

When political action generates new policies, or creates new states of affairs, these changes invariably come complete with a set of justifications, with or without a claim that the justifications are founded in scientific investigation or well-established social theory. Often, a very effective way of testing such claims, and the social science backing them, is to do a case study of the policy, or the changed state of affairs, enquiring into its causes and the effects it has produced, in order to test the validity of the original justification. A series of such case studies may, in turn, generate insights that are capable of producing theoretical advances.

Immigration and homelessness studies

A case in point is a series of case studies I've undertaken, now nearing completion, that were designed to test the efficacy of government immigration and homelessness policies, and, as well, to test some theoretical propositions I had earlier formulated - on the basis of other case studies - about the much-underestimated policy significance urban population growth rates.

In order to produce theory, studies must be grounded in theory. The starting-point for my case study series was the widely held recognition that globalization has moved cities to centre-stage in societies everywhere. Our collective well-being, both economic and social, depends on the prosperity and well-being of our cities, because, although we need food, minerals and other products of the countryside, it is cities that are our primary centres of creativity, decision-making, and ultimately of wealth-generation.

Globalization has sharpened our awareness of this reality because free trade agreements have reduced the capacity of national governments to protect urban regions from international competition, and modern communications have reduced the importance of location, plunging cities everywhere into direct competition with each other. Accordingly, we need to think carefully about how our political decision-making affects our cities. Governments everywhere, including the Canadian government, are doing that, by trying to find ways of ensuring that national policies contribute to the economic viability and social health of cities and communities.

This task is complicated by the fact that each community is as unique as each human individual. Therefore, although it is possible to set national objectives and standards that apply to all communities, complete uniformity of policy making and implementation is probably not achievable and is, in any event, undesirable, because what works in one city may not work in another. The Canadian government has addressed this reality by trying to ensure that the implementation of national policies can be tailored to the particularities of different communities.

My study focused on two examples of policies designed in this way: the National Homelessness Initiative and Immigration and Settlement. My research assistants and I looked at the implementation of these policies in three very different cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick - in order to test whether these policies were successfully adapted to a range of very different local conditions.

Findings

Here are some of our most interesting findings:

The rate of a city's population growth plays a critical, and widely overlooked role in determining the appropriateness of different policy choices. Policies that may be appropriate for rapidly growing cities are different from those that are appropriate for slow-growth cities. There is a strong tendency, however, for decision-makers in slow-growth cities to pretend that they will be able to increase their rates of growth, and premise their policies on future rapid growth - growth that rarely materializes.

The National Homelessness Initiative (NHI) contained provisions for consultation with local service providers to determine how NHI funding would be allocated. However, the NHI was created to address conditions in rapid-growth cities, and federal government policy in this area was not sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation to the very different circumstances in slow-growth cities. As a result, NHI policies that were reasonably responsive to conditions in Vancouver proved ill adapted to the circumstances of Winnipeg and Saint John.

Federal immigration and settlement policies were adapted to local circumstances via federal-provincial agreements that devolved some responsibilities to provincial governments. In Vancouver, a famously effective network of settlement service providers suffered setbacks stemming from the British Columbia government's rigidly ideological approach to service provision. In Saint John, immigration and settlement objectives were thwarted by a local culture that proved relatively unreceptive to immigration. In Winnipeg, the provincial government implemented a set of immigration and settlement policies that have been recognized as a model, thanks to extensive consultation with service providers and flexible, thoughtful administration of a provincial nominee program.

Conclusion

The theory about the surprising importance of growth rates in setting the conditions for a wide range of policies first occurred to me because I had done case studies on a variety of subjects in such rapidly growing centres as Toronto, Vancouver and Portland, Oregon; and such slow-growth centres as Winnipeg and Edmonton, when the latter was a slow-growth centre. Because I was doing case studies, I was not narrowly focused on my particular research questions because case studies require the researcher to look broadly at the context of the question being investigated. As a result, I could not help noticing the striking differences among the cities I studied, and the way in which those differences corresponded to differences in rates of population growth.

In my comparative case studies of immigration and homelessness policies, growth rates were one of the criteria I had in mind in selecting research sites. The findings of those studies gave insights into the two policy areas and into some of the problems and possibilities of multi-level governance. But they also confirmed that policy and implementation problems were different in different cities, and that those differences were strongly influenced by population growth rates.

••••••••••••••••••••••

For more about slow growth, see:

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy". Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, pp. 193-213.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth”. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28 (2), 2006, pp. 169-89.

For more about the findings regarding homelessness and immigration, see:

Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240

Christopher Leo, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City”. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism". Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009, 93-116.

Posted by leo-c at 1:49 PM

December 1, 2009

LOCAL POLITICIANS CAN'T CONTROL SPRAWL. SO WHY IS IT THEIR JOB ALONE?

Few things are more important than the way we use our land, and yet, in North America, few things are more neglected. Among my urbanist colleagues, there are precious few who think that urban sprawl is a good thing, and even fewer who believe anything can be done about it. Why?

Among those who know city politics, it's well understood that the process of urban development is largely driven, not by the public interest in using our land efficiently and sustainably, but by the very different calculations development companies use to decide where their best business opportunities lie. In previous posts I have given examples of how that process plays out, both in large urban areas and in the smaller political arena of semi-rural, urbanizing municipalities.

Although there has been much agonizing over the apparent inability of most local governments to take meaningful control of urban development, there has been little or no discussion, in the academic literature, of alternatives to local control. And yet there are very good reasons for questioning the assumption that land use is primarily a concern for municipal councils and local planning authorities, indeed for seeing urban growth as an issue that is both national and global in its significance. Let's take a look at three of them.

The environment

It is now widely agreed that the health of the environment is a global issue. We usually think of such problems as climate change, and soil, air and water pollution as being related to economic growth, population growth and energy consumption, and rightly so, but we rarely consider the environmental significance of urban growth.

We all know that petroleum-driven transportation is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and a variety of other pollutants, but we're very likely to forget that urban land use is an important determinant of petroleum consumption. Standard-issue North American development, featuring generally low densities and strict separation of residential, commercial and industrial areas from each other, privileges the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, often eliminates other means of transportation as viable alternatives, and even forces automobile use when one might prefer a different way of getting around. (The next time you're in a suburban home, try figuring out a way to fetch a litre of milk without using petroleum.)

And that's not even mentioning how vast expanses of pavement produce run-off that pollutes our waterways, or the impact of residential septic tanks on underground water resources. In short, a very significant proportion of the global environmental problems we struggle with are driven by urban land use patterns. Urban land use, therefore, is a global issue.

Agriculture...

...is an issue that's national in scope, for a number of reasons. Low-density urban development that straggles out across agricultural areas undermines the viability of adjacent agriculture, to a degree that's more serious than most people realize. In order to impair the viability of agriculture, you don't have to pave over farmland. All you have to do is locate a few urbanites in the area, and before you know it, you get conflicts between the farmers and the space-seeking urbanites. Urban-style development may drive up the price of land, forcing farmers to pay more property taxes. Urbanites complain about livestock smells and heavy machinery on the roads, their septic tanks pollute the water table, and their pets harass farm animals. Such conflicts are well known, by both land use planners and agronomists, to undermine the viability of commercial agriculture. This concern is even more important in Canada than the United States because a very substantial proportion of Canada's limited supply of prime agricultural land is located in urbanizing areas.

Infrastructure

In short, agriculture is a national resource that is threatened by urban sprawl. Another national problem that originates in large part from urban land use decisions is the seemingly never-ending "infrastructure crisis". Since the 1990s, both Canadian and American governments have been allocating funds to address this problem, while the rhetoric surrounding it has escalated from "crumbling roads" to "collapsing bridges". The problem is becoming more serious even as money continues to be poured into addressing it.

An important source of that problem is difficult to identify from national statistics, but clearly visible at the local level. A case I have investigated is that of Winnipeg, where, for decades, money has been readily available to extend roads, bridges, and sewer and water lines - often across the bald prairie - but spending on infrastructure maintenance has consistently fallen short of needs. In other words, the city's expansion of infrastructure is out-pacing its ability to maintain existing infrastructure.

The degree to which maintenance is falling short varies from city to city, with some cities in more serious straits than others. We need much more research to gain an overview of the local sources of the infrastructure deficit. What is clear already, however, is that federal and provincial funds are being spent to address infrastructure deficits that originate, to a significant extent, in local land use decisions. The problems that stem from this local decision-making are sufficiently regional and national in scope to make out a serious case that there is a legitimate regional and national interest in the setting of urban growth policies.

In Europe, there are national and European Union rules governing land use. In North America, Oregon is notable for having enforced state regulations governing urban land use for some time, and Ontario has recently promulgated rules governing the growth of the Greater Toronto Area. It's time for other jurisdictions to assess these examples, and see what can be done better, and what can be done elsewhere.

•••••••••••••••••••

There is a vast literature on urban sprawl, smart growth and related questions, but there has been very little done in North America to treat it as a problem that is national in scope. Two recent exceptions are:

Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the wilderness: A new vision of land use in America. Washington: Island Press, 2007.

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.

Earlier publications of my own that form part of the basis for this entry are:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Christopher Leo with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is urban sprawl back on the political agenda? Local growth control, regional growth management and politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.

Posted by leo-c at 7:01 AM

September 16, 2009

IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN MANITOBA: MAKING DEEP FEDERALISM WORK

This is the second in a series of two posts about the findings I'll be presenting next week in Toronto at the IPAC-PPM Cities and Public Policy conference. The previous post dealt with the mismanagement of homelessness in Winnipeg. This one focuses on the achievement of deep federalism in the administration of immigration and settlement in Winnipeg. In both entries, the overarching theme is 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.

Vancouver and Toronto, like many rapidly-growing cities, are inundated in immigrants. Their biggest problem is providing adequate settlement and integration services. Winnipeg, like many slow-growth communities, gets few immigrants and suffers from labour shortages. Its challenge is to figure out how to use immigration as a means of addressing the labour shortages.

The Manitoba government began pursuing immigration as early as the 1970s, partly because of a consensus, at least among elite groups, which would be considered remarkable in many other jurisdictions. Because of labour shortages, and because of slow growth, in Manitoba as a whole and in Winnipeg in particular, the business community wanted immigration to address the shortages and the City of Winnipeg wanted to expand its tax base and population, and to revitalize decaying neighbourhoods with new residents. The right wanted economic growth and more workers, and the left wanted to meet humanitarian goals while building a more diverse society.

In the Canada-Manitoba Agreement on immigration and settlement, the provincial government won the right to nominate immigrants and oversee their integration. The government has done the kind of listening to the community in this case that the federal government failed to do in the case of the National Homelessness Initiative, and has, in the process, made deep federalism work. It established relationships with community groups that were interested in promoting immigration, such as the Société franco-manitobaine, which was looking for French-speakers to come to St. Boniface, the French Quarter; and the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, which, initially, wanted to rescue Jewish Argentinians from the economic collapse there and later sought to bring in Jewish immigrants from other countries.

Thanks to a plethora of community alliances, the provincial government was able, first to lobby for a provincial nominee program for Manitoba and then, with the help of feedback from the community, to develop a workable set of programs for bringing immigrants to Manitoba, connecting them with jobs, and ensuring they had the services they needed to integrate. The program is widely recognized as a model, and it demonstrates that, in a number of policy areas – not all policy areas by any means – there is available knowledge and wisdom at the community level that can be tapped by governments at all levels to produce better policy.

Governments need to work harder at figuring out ways of drawing on the skills and knowledge that are available in communities everywhere, to help achieve governance that respects community difference in national policy, and in policy at all levels of government.

••••••••••••••••

For more detail on immigration and settlement in Winnipeg, look up:

Christopher Leo and Martine August. “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510. To look at a draft of the article click here.

Posted by leo-c at 7:35 PM

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.

•••••••••••••••

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

May 19, 2009

IS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DIVIDING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE? CAN IT STOP?

I'll be at the Canadian Political Science Association conference in Ottawa next week delivering a paper originally entitled "Building cohesion, aggravating division", with an even more obscure, academic-sounding subtitle. But I've changed the title and the new one is the one I'm using for this blog entry. My article grows out of studies I did recently in Winnipeg of aboriginal policy and policy regarding immigration and settlement. Originally, these studies had nothing to do with each other, but when they were finished, I was struck by the contrast between them.

I found that immigration and settlement, which is a responsibility of the Manitoba government, was intelligently administered and scored some notable successes, mainly thanks to the provincial government's close consultation with community groups that provided settlement services, and productive working relationships with them. Not so with aboriginal community groups.

It is the federal government that bears primary responsibility for aboriginal policy, and it spent a considerable amount of money on aboriginal programs in Winnipeg, but instead of consulting with the leaders of aboriginal groups on the shape of that policy, it set program conditions and then let community groups apply for funding. As a result, aboriginal community groups, already deeply divided, competed with each other for money.

That was bound to deepen the divisions among them. In the meantime, instead of being able to work with the government in shaping policy objectives - as the settlement service provider groups did - aboriginal organizations were forced to shape their own objectives in such a way as to meet federal government program conditions.

The result: A patchwork of fragmented programs instead of a co-ordinated approach to the big issues, and a great deal of resentment among the aboriginal leadership about the federal government's failure to consult meaningfully. In my paper, I suggest how the federal government might take a leaf out of the Manitoba government's book and change its approach.

If you'd like to take a look at my paper, click here. It's a work in progress, and I'm looking for feedback, so please feel free to comment.

••••••••••••••••

For a more detailed account of the immigration and settlement program affecting Winnipeg, see Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (2), 2009.

A comparative look federal government policies in Winnipeg (including aboriginal policy, immigration and settlement, federal lands and emergency planning) will be published as part of a volume funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada project on Multilevel Governance and Public Policy in Canadian Municipalities.

April 10, 2009

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, URBANIZING MUNICIPALITIES CERTAINLY CAN'T

It is becoming more evident with each passing year that urban growth is a matter national concern. The growing ease and speed of the global movement of money, goods, people and ideas has made it more and more clear that the prosperity of nations is heavily dependent on the prosperity of cities. At the same time, poorly managed urban growth is a major contributor to the global-scale environmental problems we face. For both environmental and economic reasons, therefore, we need to think of urban growth as a national and global issue, not a purely local one.

In my previous post, I showed how, in North America, city councils are entrusted with many of the decisions that determine the growth of our cities. Since these councils frequently lack the political will to resist the blandishments of developers, in practice, we are allowing the cost accounting of individual development companies to play a major role in determining the growth of cities.

The question of whether the location and design of a new development responds to environmental concerns, and maximizes the city's ability to maintain the viability of its network of infrastructure and services, is unlikely to be high on an individual developer's list of concerns. The developer's responsibility is to shareholders, not the city as a whole. In other words, far from being responsive to national and global concerns, the growth of cities, typically, is not even responsive to the best interests of the city as a whole.

It gets worse. Most North American cities, or metropolitan areas, are actually loose agglomerations of municipalities. In those metropolitan areas, a significant amount of the growth is taking place in municipalities that are partly or largely rural. In such communities, control over growth may be even looser than it is in major cities.

I gained an insight into growth at the urban fringe a few years ago, when I attended two sessions of a Manitoba Municipal Board panel that was deciding whether to recommend approval of the proposed official plan of the Springfield Municipality, an agricultural area and bedroom community immediately east of Winnipeg. The municipality’s proposed new official municipal plan defined four land forms in the municipality:

•Two high-potential agricultural areas,

•An area near a provincial park that is the prime source of ground water for the municipality and

•An area that is defined as having lower agricultural potential.

In defining objectives for development of the municipality, the plan stressed the high priority placed on:

•Preserving agricultural viability and natural resources and

•Preventing proliferation of residential development.

A substantial scholarly literature cites a variety of ways that residential development in farming areas damages the viability of agriculture: complaints from urban residents about smells, heavy machinery on roads and other perceived nuisances resulting from agriculture; residential activities that interfere with farming operations such as commuter traffic, harassment of farm animals by pets; and escalation of land prices that inflate the cost of farming.

The proposed Springfield official plan itself stated that the growth potential of livestock husbandry had already been limited by past residential development. To this point in the plan, therefore, an analysis of land forms indicated the location of good agricultural areas and important water resources, while statements of objectives stressed the determination to preserve these assets in the face of urbanization.

However, the proposed zoning categories set out in later chapters of the plan appeared to have been established by someone who did not read the chapters containing planning principles. Most of the residential development was planned for the larger of the two prime agricultural areas and in the area where the major resource of ground water is located. All the residential development on top of the prime water resource relies on septic tanks for sewage disposal, which invariably poses a greater risk to ground water than a community sewage system.

There was a cluster of residential development planned as well in the community of Anola, which is located in the low-potential agricultural area and would therefore seem to be the natural area for urban development if harm to agriculture were to be minimized, but that community was slated to receive only a limited amount of development because it was not to be provided with the water and sewer services needed for higher concentrations of development.

Nor were there any plans for providing Anola with services, even though the plan stated that there was a demand for residential development there. Meanwhile, two urban communities in the middle of the prime agricultural area, Oakbank and Dugald, had been provided with the services required for higher concentrations of urban development. In short, everything possible was done to encourage urban development in those areas which the plan claimed a determination to protect, and almost nothing done to encourage development in the area that the plan designated as unsuitable for other purposes: a good line of talk, but no action to back it up.

Attendance at two hearings of the municipal board panel provided insights into the sources of this exercise in appearing to plan without actually doing so. From a variety of statements that were made, it became clear that numerous residents of the municipality had been able to improve their fortunes by subdividing farmland in the past, in order to sell it for residential development, and that others wished to do so in future. When witnesses at the hearing called attention to the gap in the plan between objectives and proposed outcomes the argument was repeatedly made that, since some had been allowed to subdivide their land, it was not fair to restrict others from doing so.

In short, the municipality was meeting its legal obligations by providing something that resembled a plan, but political pressures from constituents in a community small enough to allow almost anyone to have a personal relationship with her or his representative on council prevented the municipality from adhering to the principles stated in the plan. In a community as small as this one, it is not necessary to imagine cases of rye or thousands of dollars changing hands in order to understand what is happening. In the absence of clear provincial planning guidelines, pressures on council are too immediate and too personal to permit genuine planning.

The situation in Springfield is very different from that in the Greater Toronto Area, described in my previous post, but the outcome is the same: it is those who stand to gain from development that largely determine the way the community will develop. Environmental concerns, and even the question of the long-term viability of a municipality's network of infrastructure and services, is likely to take a back seat.

Elsewhere I have made the case that cities and communities ought to be more involved in decision-making about social assistance, social housing and immigrant settlement. In those policy areas, there is room for more local involvement in decision-making. Land use planning is a different matter. There is too much leverage available to those who are most likely to subvert good governance. Since the growth of our cities is critically important to the national economy and the global environment, it is everyone's business. Although local interests need to be considered in land use decision-making, local decisions should be circumscribed by rules that reflect the needs of society at large.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:

Rural Municipality of Springfield. Development Plan (By-Law 98-22). Oakbank, MB: Ruraland Consulting Ltd, June, 1998.

Christopher Leo, “Urban Development: Planning Aspirations and Political Realities.” In Edmund P Fowler and David Siegel, eds., Urban Policy Issues (second edition.) Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Posted by leo-c at 5:02 PM | Comments (4)

WHY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO REGULATE CITY GROWTH

Last October I sketched out my argument that local and metropolitan governments can't meaningfully regulate urban land use because developers swing too much political weight at the local level. I pointed out, on the basis of European case studies and my own analytical work, that the position of developers is markedly different in countries where a significant amount of city planning takes place at the national level than it is in the typical North American case. We can verify that by considering the concrete reality of how land use decisions are made in Canada and the United States.

This is not easily done, because it's impossible to trace the influences that determine complicated land use decisions without careful and persistent research. The results of one such piece of research some time ago offer a revealing example. A 10-month investigation in the late 1980s by two Globe and Mail reporters deals with land development in the area north of Toronto, part of what is now known as the Greater Toronto Area - a wide ring of suburban communities that are the primary focus of growth in the region.

The investigation concluded that the provincial government adopted a hands-off stance toward a lack of urban planning that allowed private developers to control the growth of communities in the area and that the “role of citizens in the planning of their communities has been trivialized to the point where it is ignored by many municipal councils.” Specifically, the investigation found that “A small group of powerful developers... Have a near monopoly on developable land in the... area [north of Toronto] and are a factor in rising house prices.”

The Globe and Mail documented a “loan” of $80,000 that was not repaid from a developer to a company owned by an official in the region, which was followed by approval of an industrial development proposal that had been filed by the company that gave the “loan”. There were also stories of a cheque for $4,000 from a developer to a “senior municipal official” and at least two cases of envelopes containing several thousand dollars in cash delivered on behalf of a developer to a councillor.

While such stories are rarely told in as much detail as this one was, the story comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the conventions of growth politics in major metropolitan areas. In fact, it's not necessary to point to apparent corruption to see why there is very little meaningful regulation of urban growth in most North American cities. The urban studies literature is rife with examples of city councils being overawed and bamboozled or bullied and sweet-talked into decisions that can endanger both the environment and the viability of cities.

It's important to stress that there is more at stake here than conventional shock stories about influence pedalling, graft, or lack of political will. Urban growth is a critical economic issue and will necessarily play a central role in any realistic attempt to address the economic challenges and environmental problems our societies face, as I will argue in subsequent blog entries. How much longer can we afford the luxury of allowing the growth of our cities to be determined primarily by the private economic interests of those who control the development of urban land?

••••••••••••••••••••••••

You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:

Ferguson, Jock and Dawn King. 1988. Hidden money fuelling regional growth. Toronto: Globe and Mail, 2 November 1988, 1, 11.

Posted by leo-c at 4:37 PM | Comments (4)

October 12, 2008

ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER?

In a recent issue of Plan Canada, a house organ for professional city planners, my colleague Andrew Sancton pointed out that, in the establishment of the Ontario Greenbelt, provincial government imposition produced a result that would have been much harder, or maybe impossible, to achieve through regional governance. Urban affairs columnist John Barber, writing in the Globe and Mail, cited Professor Sancton's findings to suggest that, perhaps, old-fashioned provincial oversight over municipal government makes more sense than all that fashionable piffle about multi-level governance.

"While the hives buzz with talk of European-style 'subsidiarity', national urban policy and new 'governance structures'," Barber writes, "Prof. Sancton points out that the actual Ontario government has quietly implemented almost all the policies the quasi-constitutional reforms aim indirectly to achieve." As a long-time, and unrepentant, purveyor of multi-level governance piffle, I guess it's my turn to speak.

Readers who have taken a look at some of the things I've had to say about deep federalism and respect for community difference may be surprised that I believe Barber has a point. While multi-level governance has usually been taken as synonymous with devolution of power to local government, it makes a lot more sense to me to think of it in terms of doing whatever it takes to ensure that different local communities are governed in a manner appropriate to their widely varying circumstances.

From that point of view, genuine respect for community difference might lead to devolution in some cases, centralization in others, and more complex forms of intergovernmental co-operation in still others. And, since a very substantial portion of my research career has been devoted to urban growth issues, I came to the conclusion some time ago that any effective approach to urban growth in Canada and the United States would have to involve a significant centralization of power.

I got my first inkling of that conclusion when I did a study in 1995 of urban growth management in Portland, Oregon, where such a centralization has taken place, as I showed in an article cited below. Two years later, I published a comparison of European and North American approaches to urban development that solidified my thinking, and further research has continued to reinforce that view. In this and subsequent blog entries, I hope to support Professor Sancton's findings and Barber's arguments while placing them in a wider context. I'll start by very briefly laying out one of the main conclusions I reached in my 1997 assessment of research on continental European and North American approaches to urban development.

In France and Italy, in the cases I looked at, the national government played a much larger role in urban development decision-making than in the United States, with the result that, in the United States, developers were better-placed than in Europe to exert direct influence upon urban development. I found that the Canadian situation was similar to that of the United States.

Anyone who pays attention to local and national politics can confirm those findings by ordinary observation. Land developers, and others with a financial interest in land development, are in a good position to exert a great deal of influence on local decision-making, while, in national government, they are bit players on a stage dominated by the heights of national and international finance and industry. Therefore, when urban development decision-making is largely local, it is bound to conform much more closely to the interests of land developers than when it is national. And, as I have argued elsewhere, the interests of developers are far from synonymous with the requirements of environmental sustainability, as well as those associated with an efficiently managed network of urban infrastructure and services, and healthy commercial agriculture at the urban fringe.

In subsequent blog entries, I hope to support these findings, and add detail and nuance, by looking at other research.

••••••••••••••••••

The 1997 article I refer to is:

Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The 1995 study of Portland was published as:

Christopher Leo, “Regional Growth Management Regime: the Case of Portland, Oregon.” Journal of Urban Affairs 20 (4), 1998, 363-394.

John Barber's column appeared 2 October 2007.

Posted by leo-c at 6:34 PM

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 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 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

March 2, 2008

PEAK OIL, SUBURBIA AND POLITICAL TIPPING POINTS

James Howard Kunstler has been telling anyone who will listen that we will, very soon, experience a shock that will force a fundamental re-thinking of how we build our cities. Kunstler is the author of Home from Nowhere and Geography of Nowhere, sharply worded polemics against modernist architecture and street design. More recently, in The Long Emergency, he has become a prophet of suburbia's doom.

His latest argument, in a nutshell, is that, having passed into an era in which world supply of oil has entered a long decline, we face, not only sharp increases in the price of oil products, but also shortages. Once the shortages hit, we will be forced into a fundamental re-thinking of our consumption habits in general and our urban development practices in particular. Wrenching social and economic change will follow, and suburbia as we know it, as well as much of the rest of civilization as we know it, will become a thing of the past.

That's a good way to sell books. Whether it - despite overwrought rhetoric and probably exaggerated claims - contains a kernel of sound political analysis remains to be seen. But before we dismiss Kunstler's argument altogether, it's worth reflecting on how quickly and easily apparently impregnable political fortresses have been known to fall in the wake of a shift of public awareness and attitude.

In my youth, I saw drunken driving, smoking in public buildings and vocal racism all flagrantly, and often boastfully, put on public display. Today, though all three are still with us, they are widely frowned upon, and strict legislation has driven them underground. "If you can't drink and drive, how are you going to get home?" is no longer considered a funny line. In all three cases, a change in public perception was a tipping point after which legislative change came relatively easily.

Today, Kunstler and others who argue that conventional North American urban development is environmentally and socially unsound are often heard but rarely taken seriously. The idea that it might be possible to overcome the formidable economic interests, public perceptions, and bureaucratic obstacles that support the way we are building our cities seems far-fetched. The development of North American cities is largely driven by development proposals, and developers typically propose spacious subdivisions, marked by sharp separation of residential, commercial and industrial districts - precisely the things Kunstler, and many other, more moderate commentators, decry. Developers generally prefer conventional built form both because alternatives are bound to encounter serious bureaucratic obstacles and because they know they will have no difficulty selling houses and commercial premises in the kinds of neighbourhoods people are used to. Both public perception and the law are on the side of the status quo.

And yet, what Kunstler and others propose is nothing more than the conventional wisdom of two generations ago. Until World War II, the normal way to build cities was to develop compact residential neighbourhoods, with public squares and commerce, and sometimes light industry, all within walking distance. It's instructive today to consider how, in a few short years, that conventional wisdom encountered a tipping point that led to its replacement by modernist urban design conventions. Let's look at that transition and see if it gives us any clues as to what the possibilities are today.

Post World War II Canadian cities have been profoundly shaped by interventions instigated by the federal government, with all three levels of government participating in a joint venture of the kind we would today term multi-level governance. At the end of World War II, the federal government feared that the return to civilian life of large numbers of veterans would trigger a housing crisis, and feared, at the same time, that the abrupt end of wartime industrial production would lead to a return of the terrible depression of the 1930s. To meet those twin threats, federal policy-makers decided on a series of measures designed to stimulate the housing market.

Since it was private enterprise that was being stimulated, the interventions of government were not always obvious to the casual observer. For example, an amendment to the federal Insurance Act allowed insurance funds to flow into housing finance, thus freeing a large pool of capital which in turn helped a generation of Canadians to mortgage their way into their private suburban paradises. The Central (now Canada) Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a federal crown corporation, provided subsidized home loans, while the conditions on CMHC mortgages helped establish the framework of provincial and municipal planning and zoning regulations.

The federal government, through CMHC, was creating housing programs that made a new planning regime necessary. Provincial government legislation and regulations set out what was to be expected of municipalities, while municipalities passed and implemented most of the actual planning legislation. This regulatory regime, in turn, had much to do with dictating the characteristic form of suburban development: single-family homes, situated on large lots, with a large expanse of front yard looking out over a wide street, often lacking a sidewalk; a strict separation of this type of residential area from commercial and industrial development, so that residential neighbourhoods were located at a distance from shopping malls and shopping strips, and both residential and shopping areas were separated from industrial parks, where many of the jobs were concentrated.

In pursuing these policies, the federal government stimulated provincial and municipal governments to reinforce the rapidly growing popular preference for the private automobile over public transportation, to give it free reign, and to entrench it. The money lavished on suburban road-building provided easy access to locations distant from the inner city, and made large-lot housing development feasible. The clear separation of residential areas from shopping strips, shopping malls and industrial parks, which was dictated by the provincial and municipal regime of planning and zoning, assured that residents of the suburbs would become dependent on private cars for everything: trips to work, shopping and even such small errands as a run to the video store or the convenience store.

Low-density development patterns imposed obstacles on the expansion of public transit systems, which were finding it difficult - in many instances impossible - to plan transit routes capable of drawing enough passengers to make transit widely available without bleeding the public purse white. Declining transit service, in turn, further reinforced dependence on private transport. It is hardly necessary to add that the combination of growing automobile dependence and declining transit has contributed a great deal to the environmental problems we face to day.

It is important, however, to notice that all these changes took place in a few short years after World War II. By the mid-1950s, Canadian families in droves were abandoning the apartments and small-lot single-family homes of pre-war Canadian cities; neighbourhood stores within walking distance were being replaced by shopping malls with parking lots bigger than some farms of the 1930s, and streetcar tracks were being ripped up while bus service declined. A few straightforward policy changes at the federal level cascaded downward through provincial and municipal governments to produce momentous changes in our way of life and the way we use energy.

It was the fear of depression and a housing crisis - together with the fact that modernist design ideas captured the spirit of the times - that produced the political will which, in turn, enabled the federal government to take these actions. Perceived dangers, combined with changing tastes, constituted a tipping point into a new era, an era of different perceptions and a new legislative regime.

Public sentiment may be building today toward a new tipping point, an opportunity for another round of federal government action, this time to reverse some of the ill effects of the previous round. The The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems finally to have had an impact on public opinion, and climate change deniers are on the defensive.

Whether these changes in the public mood are permanent, and whether they will spawn public support for action on the environment and public willingness to consider working and living in more compact and transit-friendly neighbourhoods remains to be seen, but there are some encouraging signs on both fronts, in polls and in many of the market responses to real estate developments based on the principles of New Urbanism, neo-traditional design, or downtown living.

Suppose Kunstler is right, and this changing public awareness is heightened - and a new sense of urgency added - by, say, $2-a-litre gas, followed by "out of gas" signs on gas pumps, as demands for oil from the burgeoning Chinese and Indian economies gain on supply. Will the pressure from those influences be comparable to the fear of depression and a housing crisis that helped to push city planning into the era of modernist urban design? Perhaps.

If that time is coming, politicians and concerned citizens might wish to take another look at a 2003 report of the Canadian National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy entitled "Environmental quality in Canadian cities: The federal role". That report identifies federal taxation and aid policies that could, in conjunction with the other levels of government, have serious impacts on urban land use and transportation. Alternatively - as is often the case in Canadian politics - the first flowering of political will may have to come from such provincial governments as those of British Columbia and Manitoba, which have shown serious interest in the development of a meaningful green agenda.

The last time the federal government generated political will on urban issues, we got the green fields of suburbia. There could be an opportunity now for the growth of political will that might help to give us back our cities, and the contribution those cities can make to environmental sustainability.

To be sure, under no circumstances will 21st Century cities be the same as those we left behind in the first part of the 20th Century. Barring a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions - which Kunstler seems to be contemplating with grim satisfaction - we will still be struggling to manage massive urban agglomerations, in place of the more comfortably-sized cities of yore, but finding ways of achieving more compact form and more manageable and environmentally sustainable systems of transportation should not be beyond human imagination.

••••••••••••••••••••••

Kunstler's arguments are spelled out in:

James Howard Kunstler, The geography of nowhere: The rise and decline of America's man-made landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1993.

Kunstler, Home from nowhere: Remaking our everyday world for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.

Kunstler, The long emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 2005.

For a readable discussion of the shift in demand for housing in the United States and its significance, see:

Christopher B. Leinberger, "The next slum?" (TheAtlantic.com, March 2008), accessible at: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200803/subprime, down-loaded 7 March 2008.

The story of Canada's post-war suburban development, and its impact on our cities, is documented in:

Christopher Leo, "The state in the city: A political economy perspective on growth and decay," In James Lightbody, ed, Canadian metropolitics (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman), 1995, ch 2.

See also the link above to the NRTEE document that proposes new environmental policies, and, for more history, take a look at:

Humphrey Carver, Houses for Canadians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948).

John Sewell, "Where the suburbs came from," in James Lorimer and Evelyn Ross, The Second city book: Studies of urban and suburban Canda (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company), 1977, 10-17.

Posted by leo-c at 4:59 PM | Comments (1)

December 3, 2007

A NEO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION FROM BELOW? WATCH OUT, CANADA

Winnipeg's Sam Katz, who has been mayor since shortly after Glen Murray resigned in 2004, is worth watching. It's not clear whether he is a fire-breathing neo-conservative or - as the Winnipeg Free Press's astute city hall observer, Bartley Kives insists - a moderate, but lately there have been some straws in the wind, and they may herald a new direction in Canadian urban politics, one that could be emulated in other cities.

Mayor Katz (rhymes with "dates") has set the objective of eliminating the business tax, leaving a $55 million budget hole that must be filled in ways not clearly specified. He is a shrewd, sophisticated political operator, who, so far, has commanded city council votes with apparent ease, and side-steps embarrassing questions with the finesse of a magician making a coin disappear. He is also a skilled practitioner of budget magic, as we will see.

So what does that have to do with a social revolution? Stay tuned.

In order to consider the question of how the $55 million budget hole will be filled, the mayor appointed the so-called Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC). The EOC claimed to have consulted widely before returning its recommendations last June, but most of those who made presentations were city councillors or city officials. Subsequently, the EOC report was made part of the budget process, without further public scrutiny.

The mayor and his supporters will bend every effort to avoid public debate about the policy directions involved in achieving the savings needed to abolish the business tax. Indeed, it would be naïve to suppose that a city council embarking on a plan to improve the fortunes of one group of citizens to the tune of $55 million a year will be particularly forthcoming with those who will carry the burden.

It is up to voters, therefore, to look out for themselves, to follow those coins, as they move from one budget category to another, and to try to understand the implications for Winnipeg's future. In doing so, it is important to take a critical look at some of the possible sources of savings. For starters, city council has approved a transit fare increase, from $2.00 to $2.25, which is expected to yield an additional $2.2 million annually in revenue. Some of that money, according to the mayor, will go to increased costs, but an undetermined amount will be put into a reserve fund for a future rapid transit system.

So, an undetermined portion of $2.2 million will go into a fund to pay for a transit system the cost of which Mayor Katz estimates at $300 million to $1 billion. Since the mayor has already demonstrated his unwillingness to consider funding rapid transit in the conventional way, one transit line at a time, it seems less than certain that there will ever be a rapid transit system. If so, what will happen to the reserve fund? Will the money slip quietly into general revenues, or go to lessening the cost of another reserve fund, and in the end help indirectly to pay for the tax cut, or future tax cuts? The question is worth asking.

Similar manipulations have been a regular feature of Winnipeg's budget process in the past, and Mayor Katz bids fair to be even better at it than his predecessors. For example, when federal gas tax funds were made available to municipalities, Winnipeg was required to put a minimum of 10% of the money into transit. Katz has recently gained favourable publicity by investing in bus shelters, hybrid buses, and diamond lanes.

However, when the draft capital budget was announced in late November, ongoing revenue from the transit-targeted gas tax funds were quietly shifted into the "Transit Building Replacement Reserve". In plain English, the transit improvement money was shifted into public works. And what has happened to the money previously allocated to transit buildings? Voters and skeptical councillors would be well advised to follow those coins.

City council has also passed an 11.6 per cent increase in water and sewer rates. The money is supposedly needed to help pay for a $300 million water treatment plant, but, at the same time, the transfer from water and sewer rate revenues into the general fund is to be increased by $11.1 million, bringing the total being diverted annually to $32.5 million. The money, it should be noted, is being diverted from sewerage improvements at a time when the city is under a legal obligation to invest heavily in a seriously deficient sewer system.

To be sure, under pressure from opposition Councillor Dan Vandal, Katz revived a broken election promise to end the practice of diverting water and sewer revenues into the general fund, but not this year. In any event, we are hardly likely to have seen the last of this kind of budget sleight of hand.

Other possible sources of savings are set out in the EOC report. Five million dollars was to come from selling off pools and fitness centres, turning them over to voluntary associations or contracting out the services. With regard to sell-offs or conveyance to voluntary associations, we need to ask ourselves whether we want these services to be viewed as businesses that have to turn a profit, or to keep them as a public service available to everyone, including those who can’t afford a fitness club membership.

Another $2 million in savings was to come from the library system. Here two recommendations are notable. One is to make more use of volunteers. This might work with a few marginal items like reading programs, but do we want volunteers to do any of the more technical jobs involved in library maintenance? The other notable recommendation is to partner with schools where library branches and schools are located close together. How would that work? Would school children have to go to the local library branch for their school library needs, or would library patrons have to go into schools?

Neither option seems feasible. A more likely outcome would be the closing down of library branches, with the justification that students using it would be able to use their school library instead. In fairness, Mayor Katz has provided a verbal assurance that savings from pools, fitness centres and libraries are “off the table”. But, in view of the fact that a total of $7 million in savings were anticipated, it is worth remembering that something taken off a table can be replaced.

Another recommendation of the EOC report reads: “Sell off or tender out the management of the city’s golf courses.” The report also recommends that the city consider off-loading the costs of various city services in commercial districts on the members of Business Improvement Zones. Included in the list of services the EOC feels BIZs might be asked to pay for are street and bus shelter cleaning and enforcement of panhandling and vagrancy by-laws. Golfers and small business people take note: the business tax reduction is a potential source of worry for a lot of people besides the usual suspects from the social activist community.

The EOC report further recommends that the city undertake a “pilot project” in off-loading the costs of some city services to neighbourhood associations. It claims that around the world such associations “raise billions of dollars every year in order to support local projects such as pools, play structures, park maintenance, street cleaning and a number of other services.”

If readers of the report are having difficulty imagining the residents of a suburban subdivision voluntarily agreeing to fund some of their own services in order to unburden the city, they may wish to reflect on the situation of homeowner or community associations, popularly known as gated communities, which supply some of their own services. This is common practice in many American jurisdictions. When the idea of community associations was first proposed, municipal officials were delighted at the potential savings.

The other side of the coin, however is that neighbourhoods supplying their own services thereby build a case for property tax cuts. This has become a major issue in the United States and, in at least one state, New Jersey, anti-double-taxation legislation requires municipal governments to refund the costs of services supplied by homeowner associations. The best-case outcome of this course of events is a city studded with barricaded enclaves of privilege. The worst case is a municipal government with an eroding tax base, struggling to maintain services in moderate and low-income neighbourhoods. Before we start down this road, we had better take a good look at where it leads.

These and similar items could be walked onto the city council floor one by one, and, if Katz is successful, there is no reason why similar events could not unfold in other cities. What we are looking at here is a potentially substantial agenda of social change from below. At one level, Mayor Katz's budget magic makes interesting political theatre. But in an overview of the actual issues involved, there are serious questions at stake: What value do we place on quality public services? How much do we care about a transit system's contribution to clean air and the role of sewerage in ensuring a pure water supply? Will we stand by while our community fragments into a series of enclaves of privilege and poverty ghettos?

Does a revolution from below, engineered by local government, sound far-fetched? Consider what happened when the Thatcher government in Britain gave local governments the right to sell council (public) housing. In a single stroke, newly-minted property owners became Tory voters, affordable housing became a much bigger problem than before, and fundamental social change was set in train. Roy Hattersley, author and former Labour cabinet minister, sets out very clearly and succinctly, in a 2002 Guardian article, how it happened.

Those of us who care about the Canadian society that has been bequeathed to us by the likes of Tommy Douglas and Mike Pearson - and all the rest of us - will be well advised to take an interest in the boring subject of municipal budgeting, and to think through the final implications of a municipal tax-cutting agenda. If we don’t, we may wake up one day to find ourselves living in very different cities, and a different country, than the one we know now.

Want to find out more? For a discussion of the political and social issues surrounding neighbourhood associations, take a look at:

Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner associations and the rise of residential private government. New Haven: Yale University, 1994.

There is a veritable library on the sale of British council houses, and the implications for Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-conservatism. Here are three items, representing a variety of viewpoints:

Paul Pierson, Dismantling the welfare state? Reagan, Thatcher, and the politics of retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Cliff Hague, "The development and politics of tenant participation in British council housing". Housing Studies, 5 (4), October 1990 , 242-56.

David Marsh and R. A. W. Rhodes, "Implementing Thatcherism: Policy change in the 1980s". Parliamentary Affairs 45 (1), 33-50.

Posted by leo-c at 10:58 AM

November 12, 2007

IT'S POSSIBLE TO RESPECT COMMUNITY DIFFERENCE IN NATIONAL POLICY, BUT THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS A PUSH

In previous posts, I have tried to show that:

It's more important than ever in the past for national governments to treat different cities differently.

It can be done.

It's often done badly.

However, in those entries, I used examples from my research to illustrate successes and failures in national government attempts to respect community difference. In this post, I want to take a step beyond examples, and draw on Canadian experience to sketch out three approaches - policy models for multi-level governance that respects community difference. I refer to such multi-level governance as deep federalism.

One possible model is the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP), a 1970s-era program that earmarked federal funds for improvement of public facilities in decaying inner city neighbourhoods. In this program, allocation of funding was made conditional upon the completion of a public participation program in the neighbourhood in which the improvements were to be undertaken. This is workable, assuming the conditions the federal government places on the program in question are sufficiently flexible to allow for programs that genuinely reflect the particular circumstances in different communities.

A program condition requiring the community, or possibly community leaders, to be consulted, does not imply that the government should do whatever is demanded of it. While it makes a great deal of sense for government programming to be suitable to local conditions, it is equally important that it be effective in meeting its objectives. There is much value in local knowledge, but it is not infallible, and should be subjected to the tests of feasibility and effectiveness that would apply to any policy proposal. It is entirely possible for administrators to draw on local wisdom without abdicating the right and obligation to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable suggestions. Governments are used to saying No to demands deemed to be unreasonable. It follows that the fear of having to listen to unreasonable demands is not a sufficient reason for failure to draw upon local knowledge.

A second policy model for multi-level governance - the one with the longest history in Canada - is the federal-provincial agreement, intended to allow for different versions of particular federal government programs in each province. That model becomes deep federalism only if the provincial government takes responsibility for securing participation in policy-making and implementation by municipal governments, community stakeholders or both, as Manitoba did in implementing the federal-provincial accord on immigration and settlement. In British Columbia responsiveness to the community regarding settlement issues did not materialize because the provincial government had other plans.

A third policy model is a federal-provincial agreement with one or more municipal governments at the table and actively involved in shaping the agreement and in its implementation. This has a longer history than most people realize. Winnipeg’s former Mayor Bill Norrie was involved in securing federal and provincial funding, in 1981, for Winnipeg's Core Area Initiative and the program was implemented by a tri-level agency. Similarly, Winnipeg’s Forks Corporation, and its successor, the Forks-North Portage Partnership, have been governed by a board with equal representation from each of the three levels of government. Tri-level negotiations have been used in shaping other urban development agreements in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, and Vancouver.

Under the previous federal government, these precedents were carried forward. In 2005, when the federal and Ontario governments sealed the “new deal for cities and communities” – whereby gasoline tax revenues are distributed to municipalities – the signatories to the agreement specifying what funds would be made available and how they were to be spent included, not only the prime minister and the premier of Ontario, but also the mayor of Toronto and the president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. In his remarks at the signing ceremony in Richmond Hill, Prime Minister Paul Martin made it clear that he intended the event, and specifically the participation of municipal representatives, as a precedent for future federal-provincial-municipal dealings. So far, however, there is little or no evidence that the current federal government is interested in continuing to move in that direction.

In short, there is more than one way to achieve deep federalism, and there are enough examples of successful attempts to demonstrate feasibility. A challenge for the 21st Century is to build on that legacy, in order to bring communities and civil society more effectively and more completely into the process of multi-level governance, and thereby to make it possible for national programmes to be genuinely responsive to community difference, while allowing federal government policy-makers to benefit from community perspectives and knowledge.

However, although national governments themselves have much to gain from deep federalism, the reality is that there is a great deal of reluctance, among both public servants and politicians, to find ways of responding seriously to local concerns. The new deal for cities originated with an initiative of city mayors, spearheaded by the then-mayor of Winnipeg, Glen Murray, and much of the impetus for other successful ventures in deep federalism came from local leaderships or local communities. Like other ventures into more democratic governance, deep federalism is unlikely to materialize without pressure from below.

Most of the statements in this entry are documented in:

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

Accounts of immigration and settlement agreements in British Columbia and Manitoba will be the subject of forthcoming publications.

Other relevant sources are:

Judy Layne, "Marked for Success??? The Winnipeg Core Area Initiative's Approach to Urban RegenerationSummer." Canadian Journal of Regional Science 23 (2), Summer 2000.

The concluding section of this study contains a more detailed discussion of how deep federalism can be achieved.

Posted by leo-c at 12:12 PM

October 5, 2007

RAPID URBAN GROWTH, SLOW GROWTH, AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE

Multi-level governance distinguishes itself from the traditional federal system by treating cities, and sometimes communities, as visible and significant partners in the interplay among levels of government, and not simply as the lowest level of government. The emergence of this change in the way the federal system is conceived is related to the enhanced economic and political importance of cities in a world marked by greatly increased freedom of movement for goods, people, ideas and money. In a world marked by free movement, cities become magnets for wealth and production on one hand and problems on the other. In the process their political importance is magnified.

If she were still with us, Jane Jacobs might appreciate the irony that it has taken the economic realities of globalization to force a recognition of the centrality of cities to the national economy. Long before anyone was talking about globalization, she led the way in making the case, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, that running a country as if it constituted a single economy was a sure way to get governance wrong. And since the economy is intimately interconnected with all other areas of national life, there are many policy domains in which national uniformity is a good recipe for failure.

Each city, or at least each urban-centred region, is a different economy, and should be governed differently from other cities. I have used the term "deep federalism" to describe policy that succeeds in respecting community difference. How can we accomplish that? There is no easy way to understand community difference, no simple set of generalizations that will allow us to say that a community of type A has characteristics B, C and D, while a community of type E has another set of readily definable characteristics. If there were, there would be no need for deep federalism. The federal government could develop a different policy model for each of a finite number of well-defined community types and administer everything from the centre. But there is nothing finite about community difference.

Despite that, my research on multi-level governance has uncovered one variable that seems particularly robust, and my findings regarding this source of community difference confirm the results of earlier research. (See also "Being realistic about urban growth", listed below.) A very basic reason why different cities need different policies is population growth rate. Cities with rapid population growth face a very different set of problems than cities that are growing slowly. This is obvious in a number of policy areas, including two - housing and immigration - that are covered by my multi-level governance research. An exploration of the importance of this source of difference in both policy areas helps us to better understand the need for deep federalism while providing insight into some of the problems posed by differences in growth rate.

Immigration is always a sensitive political issue in Canada, and it has been especially so in recent years, as immigration legislation has undergone a series of hotly contested revisions. Throughout these changes, the government has been under pressure to limit immigration, on the basis of fears that immigrants will place undue burdens on the social safety net and that they will take jobs from Canadians. Whatever the merits of those arguments — the case against immigration is less than compelling — a point that has been frequently overlooked is that immigration has very different impacts on different communities. Much of the controversy surrounding immigration is centred in major metropolitan areas, especially such growth magnets as Toronto and Vancouver. In Toronto, much is made of fears that the city will attract large numbers of immigrants with limited skills, many of whom, it is feared , will end up a burden on the state, and perhaps become involved in criminal activity. In Vancouver, there has long been controversy over allegations that Asian immigrants are driving up the cost of housing.

If such arguments have any substance at all, they are relevant mainly for the few metropolitan areas in the country with rapid population growth and high housing costs. In our research, the clearest contrast with Vancouver and Toronto is Winnipeg, a slow-growth centre that is not even remotely in danger of becoming inundated by large numbers of any population. By the same token, the city is an ideal location for people, especially those with limited resources, who are looking for a stable community and a chance to make a future for themselves and their families: a large stock of affordable housing; some decent schooling at all levels, even in poorer neighbourhoods; and, for people from dozens of different countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia, a supportive community environment.

The benefits Winnipeg offers immigrants are matched by the advantages their influx holds for a city suffering from labour shortages and badly in need of more residents in declining older neighbourhoods. The Manitoba provincial government has been aware of the potential benefits of immigration in a slow-growth jurisdiction since at least the late 1970s, but a federal government response was slow in coming. Thus, until the late 1990s, Winnipeggers were treated to the spectacle of Torontonians bitterly complaining about immigrants while national policies denied Winnipeg the immigrants it needed. Immigration policy, therefore, provides an excellent example of the importance of deep federalism, and the significance of urban population growth. A uniform national immigration policy is simply counter-productive, for reasons intimately connected with urban growth rate. A slow-growth city like Winnipeg may be looking for more immigrants, even while rapidly growing cities are struggling to cope with the influx they already have.

Similar observations can be made about urban growth and housing. Rapidly growing Vancouver, typical of cities in similar circumstances, suffers from runaway housing prices, prices high enough to pose serious problems for the middle class and to drive some poor people into the streets. Winnipeg, meanwhile, has much more affordable housing. A Statistics Canada comparison of salaries and housing costs for Vancouver and Winnipeg gives some sense of the scale of that contrast.

Click here for cost of living and housing comparison.

With housing cost differentials that dwarf differences in income, it is small wonder that Winnipeg has less absolute homelessness — the social service term for life in the streets, under bridges, in parks or in shelters — than Vancouver and Toronto. In Vancouver, homeless censuses produced a total of 1049 in 2002 and 2112 in 2005. In Toronto, according to David Hulchanski (cited below), the average number of people using emergency shelters on any given night was 4900 in 2000, 4600 in 1999 and 2400 in 1992.

Meanwhile, a report titled “A community plan on homelessness and housing in Winnipeg”, prepared by the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and representing the views of 36 community groups involved in service delivery to homeless people, did not attempt a count of the absolutely homeless. Rather, in a carefully thought-out strategy for dealing with homelessness, the focus was not on street people but on what service providers call the relatively homeless: people who are paying far more than they can afford for housing, or are living in seriously inadequate shelter.

Why? In Winnipeg, as in other slow-growth centres, while the numbers of street people are not as overwhelming as those in Toronto and Vancouver, the numbers of people in desperate need of housing that is both affordable and conducive to stable family life is nevertheless very substantial, because low housing costs undermine the incentive for home maintenance. The result is relatively ready availability of a great deal of ramshackle housing, and a stakeholder consensus that the priority must be affordable housing.

In short, the rate of urban population growth is a critical determinant of a range of important differences among cities. Certainly in both immigration and housing, uniform national policies for cities growing at different rates are a good way to go wrong.

The points made in this blog entry are documented in:

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

Want to find out more about this topic? Take a look at:

Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.

J. David Hulchanski, "A New Canadian Pastime? Counting Homeless People." Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, December, 2000.

Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, "A Community plan on Homelessness
and Housing in Winnipeg. Winnipeg: Social Planning Council, 2001.

Posted by leo-c at 5:21 PM

September 10, 2007

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: DO WE NEED THE GOVERNMENT TO BUILD COMMUNITY CAPACITY?

In recent years, my research of multi-level governance in Canada has encompassed 13 case studies, dealing with six policy areas in three Canadian cities. Taken together, those studies provide a considerable body of evidence that the quality of national policies could be improved if local communities, or their authentic representatives, had a bigger role in policy formulation and implementation. They show with equal clarity that, while the federal government pays lip service to the importance of community input into policy-making, federal politicians and public servants are reluctant to match their words with action. A quick look at some of the studies my research assistants and I conducted provides a glimpse of these findings.

In two of the policy areas we studied, the federal government devolved a great of the responsibility for policy-making and implementation to the provincial or local levels with the explicit objective of ensuring the appropriateness of policy outcomes to the distinct circumstances of different communities. The policies in question were the National Homelessness Initiative (NHI) and federal-provincial agreements regarding immigration and settlement.

My research assistants and I looked at how each of those programs were being implemented in three Canadian cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick. Two policy areas in each of three cities added up to six case studies in all, and we had the opportunity, through interviews and documentary evidence, to look closely at the capacity of local stake-holders to participate in policy formulation and implementation in all six cases.

In all but one of the cases, we found stakeholders that not only had the expected intimate understanding of the situation in their community, but were also well versed in the literature, knowledgeable regarding experiences in other communities relevant to their area of interest, and entirely capable of organizing themselves to study options, formulate priorities, and implement them. The one exception was the immigration and settlement stake-holder community in Saint John, and the reason for its unfitness to contribute constructively to policy-making and implementation was not any lack of ability or knowledge. The problem, rather, was a long-standing feud within the community that stood in the way of co-operation among those concerned with immigration and settlement issues.

Despite the apparent willingness and ability of five of the six sets of stake-holders to contribute to policy-making, in only one of the six cases did senior government officials listen and respond genuinely to community representations. In the three National Homelessness Initiative case studies, the reason was straightforward: the Canadian federal government was determined to maintain an earlier decision to retreat from the provision of affordable housing. When the problem of homelessness in Toronto became too conspicuous to ignore, the NHI was created, with the bizarre proviso that none of the funds contributed by the federal government could be used for the provision of housing.

Anxious to be responsive to community concerns about homelessness, but unwilling to pick up the hot potato of affordable housing, federal officials descended into a spin doctor's nether-world of pretense unmatched by action. Federal officials turned a deaf ear when they were informed by stake-holders that, actually, affordable housing had an important role to play in addressing the problem of homelessness. During the first three years of the program covered by our studies, homelessness advocates and service providers found that, in order to qualify for federal funding, they had to put in proposals for such things as emergency shelters, services to street people and homelessness research. Any money for affordable housing became dependent on the much slenderer resources of the provincial and municipal governments.

Our study of immigration and settlement in Winnipeg, by contrast, offered an example of what can be accomplished when a senior government is able to muster the necessary flexibility to develop productive working relations with community organizations. Winnipeg and a number of other Manitoba communities were anxious to promote immigration in order to address a variety of labour shortages that were bottle-necking economic development. When the province was finally able to conclude an agreement with the federal government that allowed it to nominate immigrants to fill the jobs that were going begging, it hit the ground running.

As Martine August and I show in a draft study, the provincial government looked to community organizations to play an active role in both selection of immigrants and their integration into Canadian life. The declining Jewish community, for example, was looking for new members, the Société franco-manitobaine wanted to encourage the immigration of French speakers, and in the flourishing Filipino community there was a demand to bring in family and friends. Provincial officials worked closely with organizations representing the communities, in some instances devolving some of the implementation to them, and took care to ensure that terms governing the program, and methods of implementation, were adjusted from time to time to address difficulties that arose.

Despite difficulties, the program has been widely recognized as a big success, and it is being emulated elsewhere. The achievement is all the more impressive in light of its rarity. It is not easy for officials to display openness toward community involvement that will almost inevitably include criticism, especially when many of them are working within governments for whom the flavour of the month is a generalized disbelief in the efficacy of government.

But Manitoba's example demonstrates that showing receptiveness to community involvement is not only the right thing to do, in the sense that it may open up important avenues for democratic participation, it can also be the smart thing. Community members are invariably in possession of local knowledge that can play a crucial role in intelligent policy formulation and implementation. If they can muster the necessary flexibility, and a thick skin for criticism, governments can avoid many an expensive mistake, and recruit important assistance in getting their jobs done, by inviting community leaders, and in some cases, the broader community, to participate.

In recent years, the federal government has not had much success in finding the necessary flexibility. One of the ways it has tried to avoid the onus of that failure has been to claim that its programs build "community capacity" and "enhance community leadership." Such claims were made for the National Homelessness Initiative, and they were also made in another program my assistants and I studied, the Urban Aboriginal Strategy. In a study we did for a Major Collaborative Research Initiative, under the leadership of Robert Young of the University of Western Ontario - neither of whom bear responsibility for our findings - we concluded that Winnipeg’s aboriginal community, like the city’s community of service providers to homeless people, do not require the assistance of federal public servants to build their leadership skills.

Winnipeg's aboriginal community has strong leaders in provincial or local organizations involved in aboriginal governance. At the provincial level there are the Aboriginal Council of Manitoba, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Manitoba Métis Federation and Mother of Red Nations. Three of these provincial organizations have a signficant presence in Winnipeg, including the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg, the Manitoba Métis Federation (Winnipeg Region) and Mother of Red Nations (East Region). There is plenty of competent aboriginal leadership, both within these organizations and elsewhere in the community.

The Winnipeg aboriginal community, and other aboriginal communities across Canada, face serious difficulties, and governments have important roles to play in addressing them, but the best help government can offer is not to make decisions for them, or to tell them how to act or what to think. It is to to draw on their knowledge, learn from it, and put it to work in programming.

•••••••••••••••••••••••

The findings summarized in this blog entry are carefully documented in draft studies, dealing with immigration and settlement in Winnipeg
and Saint John and in the following published studies:

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

The statements regarding the Urban Aboriginal Strategy are drawn from a draft that is not yet quite ready for posting on the internet. It will be added to this entry as soon as it is.

Here are some other published works from my series on multi-level governance.

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2008, forthcoming.

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl, “Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference.” Canadian Political Science Review, 1 (2) 2007 September. Available at the CPSR web site.

Posted by leo-c at 12:54 PM

January 17, 2007

DEEP FEDERALISM: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO RESPECT COMMUNITY DIFFERENCE IN NATIONAL POLICY?

In the age of community, with corporate mobility undermining the power of national governments, is there a role for national governments in defending the interests of local communities? In my current research, I argue that there is, but that rigid enforcement of a national standard is not the appropriate way to do it, because the differences among communities ensure that what works in one may not work in another.

What is needed, rather, is a degree of flexibility that allows national standards to be met differently in different communities, and that draws on local knowledge to determine what these differences will be. In a previous entry, I outlined briefly how such flexibility is achieved in federal-provincial relations, but there is also a little-known history of such flexibility in the relations between the Canadian federal government and local communities, as well as a current practice that tries to build on that history.

I call such flexibility deep federalism, a species of federalism that extends the Canadian tradition of respect for provincial differences to the level of the local community. An early example of deep federalism was the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP), a federal government scheme aimed at the renovation of public facilities in declining neighbourhoods, which became a community development tool through the simple expedient of a requirement that a plan for neighbourhood renewal be preceded by and based upon a public participation process in each targeted neighbourhood. NIP, therefore, was structured to respect the differences, not only among cities, but also among individual neighbourhoods.

A second example, unique to Winnipeg, was the Core Area Initiative (CAI), an 11-year, tri-level arrangement for the social, economic and physical renewal of Winnipeg’s inner city, which was administered by a secretariat located in Winnipeg and responsible to all three levels of government. Such tri-level agreements have been all but institutionalized in Winnipeg, as the CAI was followed by the Winnipeg Development Agreement (WDA), and, after that, the recently concluded Winnipeg Partnership Agreement (WPA). This approach has migrated west, in the form of the Vancouver Agreement, a wide-ranging accord that drew in a large number of partners from all three levels of government, focusing their efforts on economic development, the health of residents and public safety in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Another example of deep federalism was the urban development corporation, a recurring theme in federal-provincial-local relations in Canadian cities over the past quarter century. Examples are Harbourfront in Toronto, Canada Harbour Place in Vancouver, Le vieux port de Montréal and de Québec and the Forks and North Portage corporations in Winnipeg. All of these projects were pitched to the specific circumstances of each city. To be sure, the degree of genuine local involvement in decision-making may have varied from case to case, since some were federal crown corporations, but an indisputable case of deep federalism are the Winnipeg corporations, now merged into a single entity, the Forks/North Portage Partnership. The Forks and North Portage corporations, as well as their successor organization, were and are governed by boards, with equal representation from the three levels of government.

Are these initiatives quaint relics of 1970s’ and early 1980s’ social engineering, never to be repeated? Federal government pronouncements and actions suggest otherwise. The Winnipeg Partnership Agreement (WPA), Winnipeg’s Forks/North Partnership, and the Vancouver Agreement continue to be active and, despite blemishes, have proven their worth. But there is more, as I was able to learn in the course of seven case studies I conducted in recent years. These studies, taken together, present a mixed picture of the kind we usually find when we evaluate government policy: some apparent success, some conspicuous failings, and much in between those extremes. But they also suggest an on-going federal government commitment to try to make deep federalism work.

Six of the seven case studies dealt with two policy areas – homelessness and immigration – and compared the implementation of those policies in three different communities. What these programs had in common, and what qualified them as objects of a study to test deep federalism, was that, instead of proclaiming national policies and then trying to implement them in an undifferentiated way in communities across the country, they contained provisions apparently designed to draw on community knowledge in determining what the conditions in each community were and how best to respond to them. A seventh study, the result of a separate research project, reports on a unique, municipally initiated tri-level welfare-to-work program, an abandoned and forgotten success in deep federalism.

Three of the case studies dealt with the National Homelessness Initiative (NHI), and specifically one component of that initiative, the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative (SCPI). The key provision of that initiative was a requirement that the implementation of SCPI be preceded by the formulation of a community plan, and that the terms and conditions of the program in each community be responsive to the priorities in that plan. This provision was reminiscent of the terms and conditions of NIP.

Another three studies dealt with federal-provincial agreements on immigration and settlement. These agreements allow each province to negotiate its own immigration and settlement policy with the federal government. The agreements may contain a provincial nominee program, whereby the province can nominate its own immigrants. The agreements may also provide for the establishment of local variations in settlement policy. It remains up to the province to ensure that the program is responsive to community conditions and needs, but the opportunity is there.

The purpose of the six case studies on homelessness and immigration settlement was to evaluate how well these programs lived up to their aspirations of respect for community difference in three communities manifestly very different from each other, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John. The six case studies, therefore, included a study of homelessness and housing and one of immigration and settlement in each of the three cities.

The seventh study deals with the Winnipeg Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project, a possibly unprecedented case of a tri-level program that was initiated by a municipal government. It dates to the mid-1990s, when Winnipeg was responsible for short-term social assistance, and was simultaneously burdened by a sharp increase in the welfare rolls and a substantial infrastructure deficit.

Necessity was the mother of invention as the municipal government took the initiative in the creation of a tri-level program of infrastructure renewal that doubled as job creation and training for people on welfare and was subsidized out of the money saved on welfare payments. After achieving an impressive record of success in its first year, the program was cancelled by federal government cutbacks despite the fact that it had actually saved money for the federal government.

In all seven communities local service providers and other stakeholders were involved in the programs under study. In all but one of the seven communities, we found stakeholders that not only had the expected intimate understanding of the situation in their community, but were also well versed in the literature, knowledgeable regarding experiences in other communities relevant to their area of interest, and entirely capable of organizing themselves to study options, formulate priorities, and implement them.

It is not my argument, however, that local stakeholders and officials are more astute than their federal and provincial counterparts, only that they are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, have access to much the same body of information and analysis and, in addition, have the advantage of being intimately familiar with the situation in their locality. Our studies showed that federal and provincial politicians and officials did not always perform well, nor did they always perform badly. The same was true of local politicians, officials and stakeholders.

In short, deep federalism will not produce utopia, but my research suggests that it offers serious possibilities for adapting the way we govern ourselves to the realities of the age of globalization, and of community.

To find out more about what works and what doesn't look up:

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

Christopher Leo and Martine August, National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15 (1) (supplement) 2006.

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

Katie Anderson and Christopher Leo, "Immigration and settlement in Saint John, New Brunswick: Community perspectives on a federal-provincial agreement." Unpublished manuscript. Accessible at http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/ChristopherLeo/ISSJecomm06-04-18.pdf.

For the details regarding the Winnipeg Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project, the munitipally-initiated, tri-level welfare-to-work scheme, see:

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2007, accepted for publication.

For other findings on this topic, look up:

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

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

One of the findings of my research was that a city's growth rate is a critically important and neglected determinant of community difference. For discussions of this question, see:

Christopher Leo and Kathryn Anderson, Being Realistic about Urban Growth. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy. Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.

Posted by leo-c at 4:33 PM

Christopher Leo

Research-based analysis and commentary http://uwwebpro.uwinnipeg.ca/faculty/politics/faculty home.htm

August 29, 2010

THE MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE OF URBAN GROWTH: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON

July 27, 2010

THE AGE OF GOVERNANCE: SOME PROPOSED PRINCIPLES OF DEEP FEDERALISM

June 21, 2010

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

May 19, 2010

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, WHO CAN? A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

February 18, 2010

CASE STUDIES CAN PRODUCE THEORETICAL ADVANCES: HERE'S AN EXAMPLE

December 1, 2009

LOCAL POLITICIANS CAN'T CONTROL SPRAWL. SO WHY IS IT THEIR JOB ALONE?

September 16, 2009

IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN MANITOBA: MAKING DEEP FEDERALISM WORK

September 15, 2009

MISMANAGING HOMELESSNESS IN A SLOW-GROWTH CITY

May 19, 2009

IS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DIVIDING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE? CAN IT STOP?

April 10, 2009

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, URBANIZING MUNICIPALITIES CERTAINLY CAN'T

WHY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO REGULATE CITY GROWTH

October 12, 2008

ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER?

July 14, 2008

WHY WOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CUT A MONEY-MAKER?

May 1, 2008

FEDERALISM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TOP-DOWN

March 2, 2008

PEAK OIL, SUBURBIA AND POLITICAL TIPPING POINTS

December 3, 2007

A NEO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION FROM BELOW? WATCH OUT, CANADA

November 12, 2007

IT'S POSSIBLE TO RESPECT COMMUNITY DIFFERENCE IN NATIONAL POLICY, BUT THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS A PUSH

October 5, 2007

RAPID URBAN GROWTH, SLOW GROWTH, AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE

September 10, 2007

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: DO WE NEED THE GOVERNMENT TO BUILD COMMUNITY CAPACITY?

January 17, 2007

DEEP FEDERALISM: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO RESPECT COMMUNITY DIFFERENCE IN NATIONAL POLICY?