This project investigates the question of why local governments cooperate with one another for service provision and coordinated policies. It proposes that the selection of interlocal cooperation among local leaders in the Unites States can be best understood as a diffusion process by which local elites learn from the cooperative experiments of neighboring jurisdictions and reproduce them in order to realize similar gains when it makes sense to do so. This process, I argue, is driven by the mechanisms of learning, development of networks of trust, and interlocal competition. The project presents theory, methods, and results in three manuscripts. The first uses a newly constructed longitudinal dataset of financial transfers by local governments to show that localities are more likely to cooperate when larger shares of their neighbors were cooperating in the past. This process is amplified in regions with more intense interlocal competition. The second manuscript demonstrates that the diffusion of cooperation is most intense within particular types of local service provision, namely those that involve capital-intensive and system-maintenance functions of government, such as highways, sewers, and water delivery. Finally, the third paper presents results from an original, national survey of mayors and councilors that involved embedded experiments to tease out the hypothesized mechanisms of diffusion. Findings provide strong support for the role of development of trust and learning in the spread of interlocal cooperation.

Excerpt from A Selected Bibliography on Interlocal Governmental Cooperation: Including References to Rural Areas Dunham, wally G. Informal city-county Agreements. The Urban County Congress, National Association of County Officials, Washington, 1959, pp. 50-51. Reviews 15 areas of cooperative relationships between winston-salem and Forsyth County, N. C. Believes that if trend of cooperation is continued over the next 10 to 25 years, one government will result. Eckford, mary lathrop. The Library Service Center of Eastern Ohio; An Experience in Centralized Processing. Library Resources and Technical Services, vol. 5, No. 1 (winter pp. 5-33. American Library Association, Chicago. The origins, development, operations, and procedures of an ordering, catalog ing, and processing center are examined in detail. Eight States Add Laws for Intergovernmental Cooperation. National Municipal Re view, vol. 34, No. 8 (september pp. 404-405. A short summary of the content of new intergovernmental laws in Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Washington, all involving municipalities. Emerson, haven. General Problems of Intermunicipal Cooperation (health). In Bureau of Public Administration, University of Massachusetts. Intermunicipal Cc operation in Massachusetts, pp. 6-10. Amherst, 1950. Talks presented at loth annual conference on Current Governmental Problems, April 21, 1950. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Creating metropolitan regions that are more efficient, equitable, and sustainable depends on the willingness of local officials to work together across municipal boundaries to solve large-scale problems. How do these local officials think? Why do they only sometimes cooperate? What kind of governance do they choose in the face of persistent problems? The Risk of Regional Governance offers a new perspective on these questions. Drawing on theory from sociology and anthropology, it argues that many of the most important cooperative decisions local officials make—those about land use planning and regulation—are driven by heuristic, biased reasoning driven by cultural values. The Risk of Regional Governance builds a sociocultural collective action framework, and supports it with rich survey and interview data from hundreds of local elected officials serving in the suburbs of Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a story of the Rust Belt, of how local officials think about their community and the region, and—most importantly—of how we might craft policies that can overcome biases against regional governance.