Christopher Leo

July 27, 2010

THE AGE OF GOVERNANCE: SOME PROPOSED PRINCIPLES OF DEEP FEDERALISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more on settlement services in Vancouver, see:

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

For a discussion of deep federalism, see:

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

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

June 21, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist's conception of the centre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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For more on community-based governance, look up:

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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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

Christopher Leo and Martine August. National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow-Growth City. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21. To view a draft of the paper, click here.

Posted by leo-c at 5:12 PM

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.

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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.

See also:

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

Posted by leo-c at 1:33 PM | Comments (2)

May 1, 2008

FEDERALISM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TOP-DOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

••••••••••••••••••••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by leo-c at 11:22 AM

December 18, 2007

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE, RESCALING, AND GLOBALIZATION: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

In a globalizing world, we have to reconsider, not only the way we govern our communities, but also how their governance interacts with the governance of regions and nations, as well as global governance.

By chance or otherwise, I became interested in this topic - and researched and wrote about it - quite awhile before anyone thought of such felicitous terms as rescaling or multi-level governance. As a result a lot of useful data are buried away in publications today's researchers are unlikely to identify as relevant sources. Therefore, I offer the following bibliographic note, listing the publications in question, together with a brief note for each, explaining its relevance to rescaling, multi-level governance, or the evolving place of cities in a globalizing world. Some of these articles were published as journal articles, others as book chapters, but all are based on original research.

This annotated bibliography does not include my recent publications, such as “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy”, which is in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, 39:3 (September 2006) 481–506. In that article, and others recently published or in press, it is clear that the topic has something to do with rescaling.

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE (RESCALING)

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton. "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Made the case that the government of Canada, already in the 1980s, was finding ways of developing different federal government programs for different cities, a key characteristic of multi-level governance. The article explores the political calculations that motivate the federal government to provide unique programs for each city, instead of continuing its long-standing practice of making the same programs available to all cities.

Christopher Leo. "The State in the City: A Political Economy Perspective on Growth and Decay." In James Lightbody, ed. Canadian Metropolitics. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1995, ch 2.

As recently as the mid-1990s, the study of Canadian city politics was synonymous with the study of local government. Much of that literature left readers with the impression that the federal government had little to do with cities. This article makes the case that the way cities have grown has been absolutely central to the evolution of our national life, and that the national government has played a central role in shaping city growth.

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

This article finds that the strong national state presence in urban politics that is evident in continental Europe is associated, on one hand, with a political environment that tends to be unreceptive to grass-roots participation in urban development decisions and, on the other, with more state control and less clout for developers in urban development decisions. In the United States, it finds the opposite situation: a more receptive environment for grass-roots participation and developers who are better-placed to exert direct influence upon urban development. In Britain and Canada, the study finds a more complex, "mid-Atlantic" state of affairs.

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

Much of the study of urban regimes sees urban politics as a purely local matter. This article shows that the regime in Portland that was responsible for the city's growth management included interest groups with a state-wide base of support as well as the government of Oregon. In other words, local regimes may well include elements from outside the locality. It might be useful to think of this phenomenon as rescaling from below.

CITIES AND GLOBALIZATION

Christopher Leo. “The Urban Economy and the Power of the Local State: The Politics of Planning in Edmonton and Vancouver." In Frances Frisken, ed, The Changing Canadian Metropolis: Contemporary Perspectives, vol 2. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, 1994, 657-98.

A comparison of land use planning controls in Vancouver with those in Edmonton, making the case that stricter controls are easier to achieve in cities that have more clout in the global economy.

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

On the basis of a European-North American comparison, this article makes the case that global economic, technological and administrative pressures work in the direction of making cities around the world more similar to each other, but that a careful cross-national comparison of political practices reveals ongoing tendencies toward the preservation of national differences. In a similar vein, Paul Doremus and colleagues argue that national corporate cultures, and the regulatory apparatus that supports them, are highly resistant to global economic pressures for homogenization. This argument is convincingly set out in Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly, and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

RECENT WORK

Following is a list of some more recent articles on this topic that I wrote with help from my friends:

Christopher Leo. 2006. Deep federalism: Respecting community difference in national policy. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3): 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2006. National policy and community initiative: Mismanaging homelessness in a slow growth city. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15, no. 1, (supplement).

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl. 2007. Multi-level governance: Getting the job done and respecting community difference – Three Winnipeg cases. Canadian Political Science Review 1 (2). Accessible at: http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres. 2008. Deep federalism through local initiative: Unbundling sovereignty in Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Political Science 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns. 2007. Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Christopher Leo with Martine August, Mike Pyl and Matthew D. Rogers. Multi-level governance without municipal government. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2007. The multi-level governance of immigration and settlement: A Winnipeg case study. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Posted by leo-c at 7:43 PM

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.

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.

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

July 23, 2007

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON POLITICS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton, "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Posted by leo-c at 4:51 PM

January 18, 2007

HOW SHOULD COMMUNITIES BE GOVERNED IN THE WILD WEST OF GLOBALIZATION?

In a previous blog entry, I looked at why, in the 21st Century, national governments are becoming less able to sustain the economies and the social safety nets of local communities, even as cities become more obviously central to the economy. In a related entry, I offered a community perspective on globalization's wild west, and pointed out that globalization is a two-edged sword. Corporations can amass the power and wealth that is achievable by operating on a world scale, but local communities can also operate on a world scale in forging alliances, seeking support and mounting political action.

But politics is not only an arena for conflict among contending forces, it is also a system of organized decision-making and action, a system of governance. If our world is marked by the escalating power of corporate mobility, the declining power the national state, and the growing economic importance of cities, what does that imply for governance? In a world of drastically shifting power relations, should government remain essentially as it was in the 19th Century?

A lot of thought is being given to this question. It is coming to be widely agreed that there are compelling reasons for cities to evolve economic development strategies and social supports specifically designed to deal with their own, unique set of problems and possibilities. But how? Some interesting answers are being proposed, and tried, in Canada. In this article, and a subsequent one, I take a look at them, and consider their significance.

One answer comes from the charter city movement, based in Toronto, Canada's biggest city, and an economic powerhouse that provides an apt illustration of the importance of city economies to national well-being. The charter city movement's position is spelled out in a model framework for a city charter in which the city is declared to be “an autonomous and accountable order of government”. The model charter binds the Province of Ontario, which includes Toronto, to consult the city before taking actions that affect it, allows the city to negotiate directly with the federal government, and sketches out “a dispute resolution process to be used by City and provincial officials if any future disagreements arise over the meaning of the Charter.”

Such provisions would entail an all but unthinkable revocation or voluntary renunciation of the constitutional authority of provinces over municipal affairs, but charter advocates insist, not without justification, that Toronto's wealth, and its importance to the national economy, entitles it to a bigger share of both wealth and power. Clearly, the charter city concept is grounded in a demand for radical change in intergovernmental relations.

If the charter city argument ever approaches the threshold of political viability, it will encounter resistance, not only from provincial governments unwilling to relinquish a substantial share of power, but also from many who will question the democratic bona fides or the competence of municipal councils, and from such commentators as Castells, who argues that “local... autonomy reinforces territorially dominant elites and identities, while depriving those social groups who are either not represented... or else are ghettoized and isolated.”

More significantly, it will become enmeshed in the ongoing debate over the race to the bottom. Critics will point out that if autonomous communities were to be set free to fend for themselves in an unfettered global economy, the casualties might well outnumber the successful contenders. In fact, for every commentator making the case for city charters, there are probably several expressing dismay over the effects of government cutbacks and down-loading on low-income communities and on the integrity of the social safety net, and calling for the federal government to become more involved in the setting of standards and the financing of programs. Greater centralization of power probably has more support than city charters would.

So will it be a stronger central government or greater municipal autonomy? Or is it perhaps not a question of either/or? Thomas Courchene, in a discussion that focuses primarily on federal-provincial relations, rejects the either/or position, which he calls federalism as structure, and argues that the alternative to it, federalism as process, is a Canadian tradition. In his words, instead of focussing on the distribution of formal powers, federalism as process “celebrates the creative and flexible manner in which Canadians historically... have managed their federal system.”

In a wide-ranging and perceptive essay, Courchene argues that Canadians have long practice in the regulation of the relations between federal and provincial governments by means that avoid the rigidities of constitutional provisions, in which powers are assigned irrevocably to particular levels of government, and place a premium on flexible adaptation to changing circumstances. These innovations "were the result of process, not structure, although in many cases they were tantamount to a de facto alteration of the division of powers in the federation."

Courchene's suggestion is that, within the constitutional division of powers, creative avenues of policy-making are being found that involve co-operation between governments and that allow for policies which take account of the differences among different regions of the country. This has been done by means of federal-provincial administrative arrangements that allow for numerous differences in the treatment of different provinces, and do it through negotiation and compromise, unencumbered by the rigidity of constitutional provisions.

One of the examples he cites is Medicare, a federally and provincially funded, provincially-managed, government-financed national health plan. Other examples include an arrangement whereby the federal government manages income and corporate tax collection for some provinces while others see to their own taxation, and an equalization scheme designed to reduce the economic disparities among provinces. All of these arrangements, and other, similar ones, are arrived at through negotiation and mutual agreement.

Courchene argues that these federalism-as-process arrangements have, over time, worked in the direction of growing provincial self-determination. In many ways, his analysis parallels those of commentators who advocate a re-evaluation of the place of cities in national politics. He sees growing provincial self-determination as being related to the advance of globalization. He stresses the enhanced importance of regional economies in a world of global trade and information flows. In short, Canadian federalism offers an array of examples of voluntary arrangements short of constitutional change that can secure national objectives while taking account of regional differences, and that do it without the need to confront the unsatisfactory either/or of local or regional autonomy vs. national power.

Since these arrangements are worked out in a political setting through negotiation and compromise, instead of a constitutional one, they have the added virtue of being flexible, and readily adaptable to changing circumstances. They offer a toolbox of flexible approaches to the accommodation of regional difference within a national framework.

But how does the toolbox help us deal with the relations between national governments and cities in a globalized world? If the differences between provinces justify different arrangements with the federal government for each province, is there a case to be made for similarly differential arrangements for different cities? Canada offers some relevant experience in this area as well, as I show in a later blog entry.

Want to find out more? Look for:

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

Thomas J. Courchene, Celebrating Flexibility: An Interpretive Essay on the Evolution of Canadian Federalism. Montreal: CD Howe Institute, 1995.

Big City Mayors' Caucus, Model Framework for a City Charter. Toronto: Federation of Canadian Municipalities discussion paper, 30 May 2002. Accessed at: http://www.canadascities.ca/background.htm, 4 July 2005.

Manuel Castells, The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Posted by leo-c at 7:34 PM

January 17, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For other findings on this topic, look up:

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by leo-c at 4:33 PM