Network Objectives
Approach
The network brings together experts in the fields of planning, economics, political science, and sociology as well as practitioners from local government. In planning the Network, we examined the current state of knowledge on regional governance and public policy within metropolitan regions. Based on these findings, we designed a research program that highlights three broad themes:
- Resilience: Because regions are subject to economic and demographic shocks over which they have little control, the network focuses on regional resilience. Resilience represents a capacity to address short-term problems in ways that generate long-term success. The network seeks to show how particular features of regional governance—the actors, cultures, policies, and institutions of a region—contribute to resilience. What are the points of intervention, the type of actions, collaborations, policies, or institutions that contribute to regional resilience?
- Governance Strategies: Although there are no regional governments in the United States, metropolitan regions are in effect governed by rules and politics established at the federal and state levels. In addition, regions have distinct histories, embodied in different formal and informal institutions, political cultures, and expectations. Acknowledging that major institutional changes are difficult to enact, the Network will examine how different governance strategies can contribute to regional resilience. What are the levers that policymakers can use or the barriers that they must remove to promote resilience?
- Challenges: The Network’s analyses will focus on several broad-based national challenges where the regional response is especially significant. These include: how growing regions address conditions such as increased traffic congestion and housing affordability; how regions that have lost manufacturing jobs build on existing strengths and attract new growth; how regions with large influxes of immigrants have responded to increased diversity and population pressures; and how the continued concentration and emerging deconcentration of poverty across metropolitan areas has affected access to opportunity and patterns of service provision. While these challenges appear as defining characteristics of regions, their origins and paths of development are conditioned in large part by global technological and economic shifts and concomitant alterations in the international division of labor.
Progress and Plans
The network has produced a series of working papers that examine key aspects of regional resilience. These include conceptual analyses of resilience; systematic national data mapping regional economic change over time; and case studies of regional challenges and institutional development in specific regions.
Network researchers are now developing a set of studies that will analyze regional resilience from several different perspectives. These include quantitative analyses demonstrating how and why regions are significant in responding to national challenges. In addition, researchers will undertake a series of comparative case studies that examine how diverse actors, cultures, and institutions contribute to regional resilience. The cases will compare resilience in regions that are experiencing similar challenges of prolonged economic decline, rapid growth, large scale immigration, and shifting concentrations of poverty. The Network will make its findings available to scholarly audiences and practitioners through working papers, edited and co-authored volumes, and policy briefs.
