Explaining Governance in Five Mega-City Regions: Rethinking the Role of Hierarchy and Government

Abstract

With the fundamental rescaling of socio-economic relationships, the mega-city region (MCR) has emerged as an important geographical space for governance. At the same time it is highly fragmented institutionally, making it difficult to overcome collective action problems such as providing regional public transport and protecting open spaces. In practice, different arrangements are employed to address these problems, including hierarchical approaches, competitive self-coordination and joint decision-making. Drawing on experiences in five MCRs in Europe and the US, the relative use and success of these approaches was investigated. The analysis suggests that the composition of the actor constellation (e.g. the number and kind of parties involved) and local political support proved to be important factors in explaining the performance of a particular governance approach. In addition, the findings provide a new appreciation for the role of the state, particularly the national government, in governing MCRs.

Acknowledgements

In addition to the anonymous referees we want to thank Pieter Terhorst, Sebastian Dembski and Ed Dammers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

González and Healey (2005) point out that governance is also used in a more descriptive meaning referring to the organisation of collective action in general.

According to Brenner (2001), it is now more appropriate to understand “geographical scale…primarily as a modality of hierarchization and rehierarchization through which processes of socio-spatial differentiation unfold both materially and discursively” (p. 600).

A more complete list of sources used for the empirical research can be found in De Vries and Evers (2008) and an all-inclusive list can be obtained upon request from the authors.

The US case posed a dilemma of whether to consider the entire northern California agglomeration as a single mega-region (as does e.g. Innes et al., 2011), or to limit the focus on the Bay Area. The first option would have made it more comparable to the UK case, while the latter made it more comparable to the Randstad.