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Foster shares insights on regional governance
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
Despite the multitude of cities, towns, villages and other nonmunicipal interests that make up metropolitan regions, no standard system exists in the United States to coordinate these autonomous local units on major issues, according to Kathryn Foster, director of UB's Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth.
"There is no regional mayor. There is no regional legislature. There is no place where the buck stops at the regional level," Foster said.
She made the observations during a June 22 presentation entitled "Metaphors for Regional Governance: Insights for the Buffalo-Niagara Region from the European Union, Iroquois Confederacy, National Football League, University of California System, General Motors and the Internet," part of the UBThisSummer lecture series.
Urban sprawl, traffic, air pollution, regional economic development and regional promotion are all issues that are not confined within the individual jurisdictions that make up a region, Foster said.
"Issues transcend local government boundaries," she said. "There is no mandate for the individual people or units affected to cooperate on those issues. It's a governance problem that's not unique to Buffalo Niagara—it's one that pervades most metropolitan areas in general."
Good governance systems are those that can understand and address problems, deliver services, resolve conflicts, seize opportunities and achieve goals. Foster said there are examples from the public, private, academic and tribal spheres of governance systems that are able to meet these aims through different degrees of centralization or decentralization.
So which is the best for Buffalo Niagara?
Foster said her research on the topic began as an exploration of the European Union. She pointed out that France, Britain, Italy and Germany—"who were fighting a bloody war as recently as 60 years ago"—now work together and use the same currency, despite having different languages, resources and cultures. In light of this, she asked: "Why, why can't Amherst and Cheektowaga and Buffalo at least get along?"
The EU is broken into the co-legislative European Parliament and co-executive European Commission, which represent the interests of the citizens and supranational interests, respectively. The interests of the individual member nations are represented through a third, co-legislative and co-executive branch known as the Council of the EU.
Foster said the structural principles of the EU, if applied to Buffalo Niagara, would create a three-part regional government: a metropolitan commission to facilitate directives on the regional scale, a regional legislature comprised of elected representatives and a council of mayors and supervisors. "[The last] is not unfamiliar," she said. "We used to have a Board of Supervisors."
But the EU model creates too large a bureaucratic system for the region, Foster noted.
In fact, regional governance is so decentralized in the U.S. that Foster locates it on a scale below not just the EU—which is the fourth-least centralized of the six systems she explored—but also the loose alliance known as the Iroquois Confederacy.
There are trade-offs between centralized and decentralized systems, she said. Centralized systems are ordered and well-coordinated, but liable to foster bureaucratization and conformity, and stifle freedom. Decentralized systems promote individual freedoms and encourage the exchange of ideas, but can fall victim to self-interest and disorganized chaos. Decentralized governments also are more vulnerable to disbandment because their members are less invested in the system.
Foster explained that the original Iroquois Confederacy broke apart after almost three centuries of existence because member tribes could not agree on which side to fight in the Revolutionary War. She said the alliance's 50-member Great Council still dismisses issues if it is unable to reach consensus after three official considerations. She said the alliance's disintegration in 1777 is of concern now due to renewed troubles within the organization between the tribes that support the construction of casinos—Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida and Seneca—versus the Onondaga, which opposes casinos.
However, "A decentralized system need not be chaotic—it could be self-regulating," she said, citing the Internet as the ultimate decentralized system. Users connect to each other in a democratic manner; there are no priorities in terms of importance or rank online, she pointed out.
Yet, there are several developments that show control is possible, even in a virtual environment designed to resist regulation, she said. One is e-commerce, which is able to control certain online functions enough to make them secure, such as cash transactions. Others are self-regulated projects that work within the distributed model of the Internet, such as open-source code projects and accurate user-contribution Web sites, such as Wikipedia.
One of the lessons Foster said she has learned from her research is that there is value in all governance systems. She notes the National Football League had centralized its power in a league commissioner to great success, whereas General Motors spent decades as the largest automaker in the world with a decentralized system of production.
Moreover, she noted it is not true that crisis is needed to change a system. For example, she said there has been a gradual "pendulum swing" from centralization to decentralization in the University of California System.
Foster said a good model for regional governance is one that is flexible and able to function as either centralized or decentralized, depending on the issue on hand.
"If you assume metropolitan regions have multiple goals, then you need to set up a system that is highly flexible—highly adaptable—with the ability to do many things at once," she said.