THE HOPE OF REGIONS:

An Assessment of the Partnership for Regional Livability's Potential

Final Draft

Peter Plastrik

On Purpose Associates

September, 1999

OVERVIEW

I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones. John Cage

The Partnership for Regional Livability is a new idea. And like most new ideas for social change, it is exciting and risky, because it promises to solve big problems but threatens to upend the status quo. It is as robust and vulnerable as an infant as it tries to turn its original impulse into action. It attracts attention, support, and opportunities, and feeds on the strength of its entrepreneurial founders. It also stumbles, drops the ball, loses its sense of direction.

The Partnership idea is this: to accelerate and strengthen the development of regional capacities to address the problem of making America's metropolitan areas good places to live, work, and raise a family. "Livability" is emerging as a complex problem across the nation. For several reasons, it can mainly be addressed at the regional level, yet the nation has very little regional capacity. Some is being built a brick at a time in some regions, in the face of resistance from entrenched interests. So far, though, this has been the work of relatively small teams of visionaries, isolated from each other and inventing each step along the way.

Enter the Partnership in 1999: Its members have watched and assisted fledgling efforts in many regions, and they concluded that two things would boost regional capacity building:

 Getting the federal government to support regionalism by sharing its expertise, information, research capacity, and resources to regional actors.

 Getting activists in different regions to learn from and help each other C and to develop tools that other regions can also use.

In less than a year, the Partnership identified four regions and about 10 federal agencies willing to collaborate on projects to solve vexing regional problems. They brought together enough funding to get a process up and running. The expanded number of partners met in San Francisco for the first time in June. Much was being learned, much was being built, much of it fragile, and much of what would happen next remained a mystery. Which is as it should be in the young life of a new idea.

The Partnership faces many challenges. It has not yet built a "critical mass" of federal and regional partners and investors. It has targeted very tough, slippery problems -- air pollution, traffic congestion, urban joblessness, disinvestment in poor urban and suburban neighborhood, lack of affordable housing, sprawl -- but still has a limited capacity to develop innovative solutions. It has engaged some federal officials in this work, but does not have a strategy for achieving the fundamental reinvention of the federal system that regionalism may require.

Yet the Partnership also has an enormously powerful asset: its highly motivated players in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Washington are developing a network for sharing information and support, while initiating important experiments and learning from them. Because they are driven by a compelling, shared vision -- the Partnership idea -- they are well positioned to take the crucial steps the next year is bringing. For as the century turns they will have to get the network to critical mass, develop practical tools and solutions regions can use, cement the federal-regional relationships, and garner enough investment to ensure they have the staying power to deliver on the Partnership initial promise.

This will not be easy. But if it works, the Partnership may help build a place for regionalism in America -- in time to respond to some of the nation's most pressing problems.

I. THE QUEST

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

One morning in late June the San Francisco waterfront is already sparkling with sunlight. Ferries, tankers, and yachts slip through the calm bay. Clusters of tan, fit youth head toward the Extreme Sports Games on the pier. Work crews tear up the street surface to make way for a new light rail line. Overhead, thousands of commuters drive across the Bay Bridge. And inside a meeting room in the World Trade Club, some 40 people have assembled.

They are the Partnership for Regional Livability: community activists, environmentalists, local elected officials, state government appointees, academics, policy entrepreneurs, foundation program officers, federal officials, planners. They face pressing problems back home, in America's great urban centers. The partners from Atlanta are under the gun to clean up that area's air pollution, as are those from Chicago. The partners from Denver want to connect poor, inner city job seekers to jobs sprouting in distant suburbs. The activists from San Francisco's Bay area hope to prevent sprawl into the countryside, while attracting private investment for housing and businesses in impoverished neighborhoods. The federal folks from Washington want to respond to these regions' efforts -- and reinvent the federal system in the process.

All have traveled to the city of Flower Power, Black Power, Gay Power, Power to the People to advance a uniquely 90s version of Big Change. They are on a quest. Their Holy Grail is Regionalism.

II. A NEW GEOGRAPHY OF OPPORTUNITY

Anon the dreadful Thunder doth rend the region. William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" (1602)

Worrying about the livability of America's mushrooming metropolitan areas is becoming a national phenomenon. Unsightly sprawl, filthy air, dirty water, traffic congestion, dilapidated urban and suburban neighborhoods, inner city joblessness are back on the radar screen. The decade's fastest growing city, Atlanta, has become, according to USA Today, "the nation's latest cautionary tale on the problems of sprawling growth: traffic congestion, poor air quality and disappearing green space."1 It is a tale on the minds of many people in many places: a troubling caveat in a time of plenty.

Metropolitan regions have become a dominant organizing force in the society. These vast agglomerations of urban core, inner suburbs, outer suburbs, and suburban-rural edges are gigantic economic engines: hundreds of thousands of workers in thousand of businesses produce for millions of local consumers and export markets. They are a complex patchwork of neighborhoods, ethnicities, cultures, and governance jurisdictions. They contain vast ecological systems and huge built systems for transportation, energy, water, and so on.

As metro regions spread across the landscape, they convert enormous amounts of undeveloped land into residences, offices, shopping malls, and highways. This triggers increases in automobile traffic, which drives up congestion, commuter time, and air pollution. It causes potentially catastrophic stresses on watersheds and natural habitats. It obliterates open land for recreation, agriculture, and pastoral view sheds. As private investment and job creation follow the same ripple outward from central cities, urban cores are abandoned to the jobless and poor who are isolated from economic opportunity. As the economic and physical gulf between haves and have nots widens, the tax burden of subsidizing growth while also financing solutions to the problems growth causes falls disproportionately on the middle class and working poor. And so on: problems of this sort are routine front-page news in most every region in the U.S.

Concern is blossoming into action: citizens at the grassroots and community leaders are mobilizing to protect green space, invest in mass transit systems, etc. In 1998, voters in 19 states approved more than 70 percent of ballot measures to protect and preserve sprawl-threatened environments.2 And politicians from small towns to the White House are running to the front of this unexpected parade, attracted no doubt by its large number of middle-class participants.

What these activists quickly realize is that metropolitan problems require metropolitan solutions. No single community -- not even super-sized Atlanta or big-shouldered Chicago -- has the resources or control over enough of the variables to solve these problems by itself. Neither state governments nor the federal government can dictate solutions. For one thing, they simply don't know what should be done. For another, the nation is firmly in a mood for devolution and localism, not top-down mandates. No surprise, then, that Vice President Al Gore did not announce a federal "War for Livability," but instead proposed a modest menu of ways Washington might help locals solve their problems.

America has little tradition of metropolitan-level or regional problem solving. In our system of governance the region is neither fish nor fowl. Neither the local, state, nor federal level owns it; regions are unclaimed zones largely uninhabited by institutions. This is fortuitous, for it means that regions are a geography of opportunity: places where it is possible to transcend the factionalism that usually tears locals apart and to avoid the insensitivity to local conditions that often dooms federal and state efforts. Places, therefore, where it is possible to craft innovative solutions to the problems of livability.

If metropolitan regions are increasingly an obvious theater for action, what remains to be seen is the play itself -- how will regional capacities be built that create regional solutions?

III. THE WORK OF THE PARTNERSHIP

Once in Chelm, the mythical village of the East European Jews, a man was appointed to sit at the village gate and wait for the coming of the Messiah. He complained to the village elders that his pay was too low. "You are right," they said to him, "the pay is low. But consider: the work is steady." Irving Howe3

In early 1999 a small group of national foundations,4 federal officials led by the Council on Environmental Quality, and veteran community activists associated with the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) launched a short-term "partnership" to support regionalism. They believed the federal government could help local civic and policy entrepreneurs implement regional agendas and that if enterpreneurs in many regions learned from each other it would accelerate progress. "Each region has something to learn from the others," wrote Partnership founders. No region "has adequately 'cracked the federal code'in a way that enables the federal government to be a participant in regional initiatives locally and as an intentional multi-purpose investor."5

The partners' essential insight was this: that regionalism is ripe to be nationalized. They saw beyond the different contexts of the many regions in which local activists are building regional visions, agendas, and capacities, and envisioned both a national interest in responding to the regions and a commonality across regions. They saw "a critical mass of interest and experience nationally. . . . grounded in multiple efforts underway in regions as diverse as South Florida, Cleveland and Portland." They saw a new way to enable the emergence of regionalism. They saw a vacuum and determined to start filling it -- by helping to build the capacity of regions and creating a "national learning network" among regions, states, and federal players.7

The partners agreed to start with four pilot sites -- more would tax their fledgling capacities -- and selected Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and the San Francisco Bay Area as places to develop projects. The idea was to develop projects that would attract the interest of federal officials in Washington. Projects had to be regional in scope, linking the interests of inner city, county, and suburb, and the product of a broad coalition of local stakeholders. They would offer the feds new ways to solve persistent problems. Then, in Partnership-speak, "national feds" would "add value" by providing their knowledge, information, networks, research capability, and funding. The federal organizations would act under their existing authority -- no new programs or laws would be sought. As a result, they would learn to become "place-based partners."

Foundations would play a crucial role in helping to pull this off. As investors in social change, they would provide risk capital to participants -- flexible funding not subject to political approval, money that would not have to come out of hard-pressed community organizations' budgets. And as civic leaders they would convene or facilitate collaborative processes to bring together the diverse, sometimes nettlesome regional and federal stakeholders. As they contribute to the Partnership, says Scott Bernstein, CNT's president, foundations also will learn more about how regional dynamics -- economic and environmental changes in particular -- affect their plans for reducing poverty, protecting the environment, and achieving other philanthropic goals. "The Partnership," Bernstein says, Ais a seedbed for building the knowledge that will help them do their job better."

The Partnership's focus on projects that would marry regions and feds gave it three concrete tasks: Help federal officials in many different departments get engaged, work in teams, and figure out how to contribute to regional projects. Help activists in the regions convene local stakeholders and come to agreements about which projects to advance. Help the regions develop and implement significant projects that would demonstrate the Partnership's value.

Easier said than done, however. As the Partnership's process unfolded in the spring, there were strains along the way.

Learning New Tricks

For the federal government, making the shift to a place-based approach led by regions has been like trying to perform a high-platform dive -- with little training or practice. No one's sure how it's to be done. "The federal government is not used to thinking this way," says Keith Laughlin, the Council on Environmental Quality's associate director for sustainable development and the Partnership's key federal player.

The problem goes beyond new thinking. Working with the Partnership regions requires federal organizations to coordinate their actions across agencies -- unprecedented and unnatural intercourse for Washington bureaucracies. Working with fellow agencies is "incredibly difficult to do," cautions Harriet Tregoning, the Partnership's representative from the Environmental Protection Agency. It's also often difficult for federal organizations to keep their national headquarters and field staff on the same page. Federal officials working in the local area "can never have too much support from Washington," says Sunne McPeak, president of the Bay Area Council.

Governments do change their way of thinking and acting, notes Ed Skloot, executive director of the Surdna Foundation, but it's usually in response to a crisis: the Mississippi River's catastrophic floods, the widely perceived failure of the federal welfare system, for instance. In most regions, sprawl, inner-city joblessness, and other problems have not yet reached the crisis level. And where it has -- for example, Atlanta's excessive air pollution triggered the suspension of $700 million in federal funding for highways -- the crisis has typically been viewed as the region's to solve.

For most federal officials (as well as other partners), a risky leap from the platform of regionalism requires vision and faith. Some are airborne already. "We've got the true believers, the people who have carried the idea of place-based initiatives in this administration," says David Garrison, counselor to the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

So far, though, the Partnership has barely mustered enough federal believers to successfully engage with the four pilot regions. "There's a limit on how many [projects] we can do," Laughlin readily acknowledges.

The regions have also had difficulties. Organizing a consensus among many stakeholders in a region is painstaking work that usually requires a great deal of time and credible, neutral facilitation. "Part of our product is the process," says Laughlin. "We are trying to bring stakeholders together in ways that haven't been done before." The Partnership's push to get regions to identify projects quickly caused stresses on the fairly modest capacities at the local level. And the Partnership's hope that local foundations would step up as investors in and facilitators of the local process was not fully realized. "Foundations often leap from object to object without necessarily engaging ourselves," observes Nick Bollman, program director at the Irvine Foundation in California.

Furthermore, the regions needed help thinking through the content of their projects. There was no shame in this; the projects break new ground and are extremely complicated. Much of the assistance came from Partnership "circuit riders," especially Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. He is familiar with many of the issues the regions are tackling (transportation system design, pollution prevention, development of inner city labor and housing markets, and so on), is connected to many experts in different fields, including federal officials, and has a knack for posing innovative, market-based approaches that are worth considering. Bernstein's assistance--memos and consultations--was lauded by the regions.

Betting on Projects

It took some scrambling to pull together projects by late June when the Partnership pulled into San Francisco for its first full-scale meeting. Each region had one project cooking and others on back burners.

 Atlanta has serious problems with sprawl: air pollution, traffic congestion, and other "livability" concerns. "Sometimes I wonder if we'll be the first city where the air catches on fire," quips Peter Bahouth, executive director of the Turner Foundation, which is headquartered in the city. In response to persistent failure by local government officials to deal effectively with the problems, the state established the Greater Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), with control over the region's transportation system, a main cause of the difficulties. GRTA leaders joined the Partnership to get help reforming transportation and developing a more comprehensive agenda to improve quality of life.9 "My hope is that GRTA will set the broader vision and agenda," explains John Sibley, head of the Georgia Conservancy, the environmentalist member of the GRTA board of directors, and a member of the Partnership.

 The Bay Area's Alliance for Sustainable Development wants to link "smart growth" efforts to combat sprawl in the region to ways to increase private investment in housing and businesses in 46 persistently poor communities in the region. "Grow inward, not outward," is the mantra of the Community Capital Initiative that targets these communities -- half of them in the suburbs -- for development financing. The Alliance became a partner to develop ways of using government resources to leverage increase private investment.10 "We need to know more about what's happening in Washington," says James Nixon, a member of the Bay Area team.

 Chicago's focus is on cleaning its air, because it at risk of failing to attain the federal government's standards for air pollution. The Regional Dialogue on Clean Air and Redevelopment is bringing together industry, environmentalists, developers, local governments, labor, and government agencies to identify innovative strategies that will improve air quality and support economic development. Organizers of the Dialogue aligned with the Partnership to get help with implementing ideas that they develop. 11"We want to learn what other regions are doing about this," says Tim Brown, a Dialogue coordinator.

 The Denver Regional Workforce Collaborative is bringing together government officials, business leaders, and non-profit sector representatives to develop regional strategies to meet the workforce needs of a booming economy that nonetheless has large pockets of poverty and joblessness. The Collaborative enlisted in the Partnership to gain information about other labor-market reform initiatives and technical assistance for its effort.

These projects passed the significance test for the Partnership -- their success would enhance the Partnership's standing as a developer of regionalism. They "reflect the breadth and diversity of metropolitan efforts taking hold in other regions," says Bruce Katz, a Brooking Institution director.12 Each region had a wish list for federal collaboration on its leading project. And when they left the Partnership meeting, each had a specific process for developing relationships with key federal agencies.

For just a few months of effort, this was a good start for the Partnership. Any large claims -- that it is reinventing the federal government or building a movement of regional activists, for instance -- would be premature, however. The Partnership is still working on what HHS's David Garrison describes as its premise: "If you sit down a group of interested and committed federal, state, and local people, and give them a task and space, then miracles can and do occur." There have been no miracles yet -- only steady work for the Partnership and an intriguing glimpse of its potential.

IV. LEARNING TO WALK

We make the road by walking. The Highlander Center13

The Partnership's two fundamental assumptions -- its genetics -- are proving to be quite robust.

One was that if regions asked federal officials to partner with them to achieve compelling outcomes, the feds would find ways to say yes -- a "build it and they will come" approach. "From my conversations with feds on the inside, it works," says Laughlin. So far leaders from eight federal departments and agencies have engaged to various degrees in the process: Commerce, Council on Environmental Quality, Environmental Protection, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Management and Budget, and Transportation.

The regions are developing important projects that demand innovative solutions: designing markets for inner city investment (Bay Area); using transportation system design as a lever to initiate a comprehensive livability agenda (Atlanta); developing regional labor market reforms that address occupational shortages and joblessness (Denver); identifying and implementing creative approaches for curbing air pollution (Chicago). These projects can help federal organizations "solve problems we find to be increasingly difficult to address," says EPA's Harriet Tregoning, one of the federal pioneers. For instance, EPA's collaboration with the Chicago region may help it learn about how to design land use in ways that reduce air pollution.

A second hypothesis was that if regional activists networked with each other and learned from each other, they would improve their own work. At the Partnership's San Francisco meeting the regions exhibited a big appetite for information from each other and began sharing advice with each other. Their momentum did not depend entirely on making a connection with the feds. As these genetic strands mature, they are creating new prospects for the Partnership.

 Development of an "Information Project." Regions have very little of the information and analytic tools they need to make decisions about how to respond to their complex problems. Information about the flow of federal funds, land surveys, remotely sensed data, street and address files, and the like. Tools that allow citizens to visualize current conditions and trends in their communities, assess alternative strategies and their impacts, and monitor progress. As it became apparent that accessing, analyzing, and communicating information was a critical building block for the regions, Partnership staff explored the possibility of a collaboration with key federal initiatives -- the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, Aurora Partnership, and New Markets Information Initiative -- to share data, and create and make available tools and techniques for community planning.14

 Development of a network of regions. The four regions' hunger for contact with each other and with activists in other regions may set the stage for more regular links with dedicated resources. Nick Bollman of the Irvine Foundation suggests that an emerging network of 14 regions around California might be a pilot for this.15 Ralph Hamilton, a consultant and founding partner, envisions building a nationwide network of regions.

 Development of links to the National Smart Growth Coalition, a new lobbying group. So far, says Hamilton, the Partnership has used a "pull strategy": learning, collaboration, the transfer of ideas and techniques. "We also need a 'push strategy' that uses political power and changes public policy."

With its track record of potential and performance, the Partnership even caught a favorable review from a watchful skeptic, the Turner Foundation's Peter Bahouth, an investor in the effort. "As we say at the Turner Foundation," he told the assemblage in San Francisco, "there is no hope -- but we might be wrong." Yet, after assessing the Partnership"s work to date, Bahouth was encouraged: "There is something about this which seems to be working. The planets are lining up."

Toward A Regional "Operating System"

There is an astonishing amount to learn about how to operate effectively at a regional level. It is not just a matter of transferring what we know how to do at the national or community. It requires the creation of new capacities to produce new solutions to big problems. No wonder, then, that questions tumble from the lips of every member of the Partnership:

 How do you build coalitions of diverse stakeholders throughout a region? How do you get local governments to participate?

 How do you bring together the various professional disciplines and competencies to design new solutions?

 How do you integrate the concepts of economic development, environmental protection, and community development?

 How do you improve social equity throughout a region?

 How do you use markets to effect positive change?

 What capacities -- such as information management and collaborative planning -- do all regions need and how can they be organized?

 What role can the philanthropic community play? Some foundations have histories of investing in the creation of new institutions to serve social purposes, such as community development corporations. But regional capacities probably will be built around networks of different kinds of existing and new organizations, rather than a new class of organizations designed to perform specific tasks. Will foundations learn how to invest in and lead this?

 How do you use government's authority and resources? What public policy changes would enhance the development of regions?

 How do you create a "regional civic infrastructure," in Peter Bahouth's phrase, a capacity dedicated to regionalism?

 How can the federal government add value to the work of regions? How can it be reinvented to ensure it provides this value? How can the Partnership keep the commitment of feds who are busy doing many other things?

 How do regions negotiate with the federal government for what they need?

 How do you govern a region?

 What can regions learn from each other?

These questions form the basis for a learning agenda about regionalism. They can be summed as a single inquiry: What is the "operating system" of vision and values, capacities, relationships, and tools that regions can use to appreciate their economic, social, human, and natural capital? No one has the answer to this -- yet.

The Partnership -- a loose affiliation of regional activists, federal true believers, and social entrepreneurs -- is developing a laboratory for regionalism that can help provide answers. It has launched a fascinating portfolio of diverse experiments: four initial regional collaborations that differ in their dynamics, structure, content, and evolutionary maturity. It has designed its experiments by drawing on the knowledge of many experts from many different disciplines. It has brought people together by building a low-overhead virtual, wired network, instead of starting a new organization. It has invested in documenting the results of experiments and reflecting on what works and doesn't work. And as it has learned, it has adapted its strategies and facilitative behaviors.

Of course there are serious challenges.

The Partnership needs to bring additional actors into its play. So far, much less than a "critical mass" of federal officials is involved. What is more, the federal value added remains suspected but largely undemonstrated; if the San Francisco meeting provided a first look at the federal "line up," the suspect is still at large. More foundation support is needed to firm up and accelerate the Partnership's early steps. Investment is needed in both the regions and the national network that is being built. The regional collaborations are highly variable in their dynamics and structure. They are scattered along an evolutionary path that, at its most developed, involves a highly integrated, multi-sectoral dialogue and decision-making process, and at its least developed involves the energy of a few social entrepreneurs. In some regions, participation in the process has not yet achieved the broadness of base that the partners believe is essential for strong project development.

The content of the projects that are emerging is quite challenging -- especially efforts to integrate economy, environment, and community/equity issues at a regional level. But wrestling with this scope and scale is slippery intellectual and organizational work: What is meant by equity? Which way of depicting a region should be used? What market mechanisms can be employed? What governance structures should be developed? And so on. The partners seem to have applied various holds to these issues and are committed to pinning them down -- but they will have to develop an intellectual discipline.

The value of the four leading edge projects as system-changing experiments is not clear yet. If they result in federal-regional agreements and there is federal value added, then they will demonstrate something about how to engage the federal government in an ad hoc, unofficial way in regional activities. This, the partnership presumed, would allow replication and, somehow, as one participant put it, the "reinvention of the federal government's mission statement." Perhaps. As miraculous as acts of coordination by federal agencies may be, they are not however the same thing as fundamental reinvention nor do they necessarily lead to that dynamic.

Still, the Partnership is building potentially powerful assets: highly autonomous players who are clarifying the "mental models" and values they hold for regionalism, who are gradually developing networks for sharing information and support, who are initiating a profusion of experiments (processes, tools, ideas) with rapid, consequential feedback, and who pay attention to that feedback. Just as important, it is keeping "ownership" of these assets in the hands of the participants. No institution or individual controls the Partnership, it is a collaboration. As much as possible the Partnership's work is being done in and by the regions, not by an intermediating organization remote from the practice field. Distributing control broadly makes it more likely that the learning that emerges from Partnership efforts will respond to what regions need. And it helps the partners tolerate the messiness and uncertainties of walking where there is no obvious path.

Thus the Partnership is well positioned to take five essential steps in the next year or so to ensure that this stage of emergence, curiously fragile and robust at the same time, leads to something worthwhile:

It must build a network of innovative thinkers to help regions identify and analyze their problems and options. Each pilot region has needed help, because they are tackling large, integrated, complex issues -- unstructured problem solving at its most perplexing. The feds pretty much face the same challenge. But the Partnership has not yet assembled enough of an intellectual capacity to help regions and feds think about these problems. Ultimately, the network's knowledge and the regions' practices should be developed into the "regional operating system" that regions use to move more rapidly up the learning curve.

It must help the pilot regions and the feds achieve serious commitments to collaborate. This means providing support and enforcing standards for what counts as a successful match. This is the first test of the Partnership's value and it must be passed with flying colors. So far, the process has been slower and different than anticipated -- an excellent opportunity for important learning about how to bring these types of partners together. But learning is not enough: the Partnership must show it can "close the deal"; this will create boost demand for its help in other regions and among other federal players.

It must build the capacity of the federal government to engage in regionalism. This is a tricky passage, fraught with political risks and burdened by the ensnaring inertia of the federal machinery. So far, the Partnership has stayed under the "radar screen" of Washington's fractious political community. But without a political mandate, it is difficult to get the bureaucracy to move in new directions. The partners must substantially deepen and broaden their penetration of the senior levels of federal departments and agencies, by making the case that regionalism will help these officials solve problems they care about. And it must prepare its political brief C for engagement with the new White House and cabinet officials that the 2000 elections will bring, and the congressional leaders who can make or break most new ideas. An important exercise, then, will be to identify the potential policy and program opportunities, capacity-building partnerships, and problem solving projects that feds and regions can undertake -- and to do this in a way that retains bipartisan credibility.

It must decide what other value it intends to create for regions. Even as the partners endeavor to link regions and feds, they have noticed that their work might create several "value chains": brokering access to multiple federal departments and agencies; convening networks and learning among regional activists; investing in strategic collaborations, such as with the national smart growth coalition; helping foundations emerge as regional leaders; providing learning opportunities for the feds, especially innovations and "horizontal" (cross-department) strategic management; providing access to new ideas and best practice information; and others. Perhaps most promising at the moment is the Information Project, which would bring many federal agencies together with regions to develop a new, essential capacity for regionalism. However, the Partnership cannot in the short term do all of these things. Its success depends on simultaneously creating many options -- new room for innovation-- while also concentrating its precious resources on the best of the options. The partners will have to figure out where their attention should go, how to say "no" or "later" to everything else, and how to keep focused.

It must build a bank account that signals it will be around long enough to realize its initial promise. Yes, it's hard to raise early-stage social venture capital, but the Partnership won't survive if it spends much of its energy raising funds and also can't pay for enough capacity to get its work done. The foundations that helped start the initiative should use their resources and leverage with other social-change investors (but not government) to put together enough money to give the Partnership a clear three-year run at its target. This will end the scrambling for cash and signal a confidence that others will notice. More important, it will allow the partners to build the capacity and do the work that is needed.

Investors should insist that the Partnership be clear about key outcomes for the effort. They should not invest in building an institution, an intermediary for regionalism, but in making things happen in the field and creating a large, vibrant network of people, information, and tools. They should ask the partners to establish a bipartisan, multi-disciplinary board of advisors who already have regionalism on their minds.

In short, they should invest in putting regionalism on the national map and doing it quickly.

A Nation of Regions?

In 1988, David Osborne argued in Laboratories of Democracy that a sudden burst of innovation at the state government level foreshadowed the emergence of "a new national agenda." The states, he wrote, were galvanized by a profound economic transition. In the 1980s, a fundamentally new economy has been born. With it has come a series of new problems, new opportunities, and new challenges. In the states, government has responded.

Borrowing a phrase from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Osborne observed that states were serving as "laboratories of democracy" in which innovators experimented with new solutions to social and economic problems. Those that worked could be applied nationally; those that failed could be discarded. Brandeis's phrase captured the peculiar, pragmatic genius of the federal system. As one approach to government -- one political paradigm -- wears thin, its successor is molded in the states, piece by piece.21

Osborne's analysis focused on the roles of America's governance institutions, the federal, state, and local governments. Regions are not in the governance scheme established in the U.S. Constitution, but increasingly they are the locus of problems, opportunities, and challenges that beset the nation.

By seeing the potential for nationalizing the development of regions through federal-region collaborations and region-to-region networks, the Partnership may be organizing new laboratories of democracy -- a capacity for problem-solving that transcends the limits of smaller places while reinventing the "big systems" of markets and governance. If so, it is important work that requires patience, investment, and will power. "The movement to metropolitan solutions and regional livability is ultimately a marathon, not a sprint," says Brookings's Bruce Katz.

If the finish line is in the distance, all the more reason to get started right away with bold steps. The dynamics of regionalism are underway -- strong market forces are shaping the economics and environment of 21st century America. Powerful interests in many regions are already organizing to take advantage of these trends -- ignoring the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised. Important public policy decisions loom -- investments in "backbone" systems for transportation, energy, water, and the like; regulations for land use; incentives for economic development; and so on. In short, a great deal is already at stake -- which ups the ante for getting the Partnership going.

Once those first steps have been well taken, the Partnership should be guided by the fairly simple rules for success of long-haul pioneering efforts: Choose your next steps carefully. Let others know how to follow. And, no matter how far away the prize, keep on walking.

ENDNOTES

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Last updated November 16, 1999.