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. / Political Science

Local governmental units in the United States are struggling to cope with dwindling public resources and surging public demands. They often turn to interlocal agreements (ILAs) as a collaborative means by which to more effectively serve their constituents. Unfortunately, many ILAs never materialize or fail prematurely. The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of 13 purposefully selected mayors in the State of Indiana to discover what factors they considered important when making their ILA entry and continuation decisions. It utilized a conceptual framework based on the transaction costs theory, as informed by the utility maximization, bounded rationality, social decision scheme, and groupthink theories. Interviews were transcribed, and data were subjected to an inductive analysis using idiographic interpretation to develop themes and to describe the essence of the ILA decision-making process. Key findings included that direct cost savings, a detailed, written agreement, contractual flexibility, an ability to perform, the effect on constituents and the current municipal workforce, and having a trusted, like-minded partner were important ILA entry factors. Furthermore, contractual flexibility, meeting constituent expectations, service effectiveness, relevancy, having a communicative partner, being able to measure an ILA service, and saving money were important ILA continuation factors, but that both service quality and doing the right thing trumped saving money. These findings have implications for positive social change because they can assist local leaders in achieving ILA success, with society benefitting from a commensurate increase in public value and in the more efficient and effective meeting of societal needs.

This dissertation argues that stormwater management is fragmented both at that vertical fragmentation (at the level of intergovernmental relations) and horizontal fragmentation (within the level of governments). The first essay focuses on the institutional arrangements used by states to implement stormwater management policies. Building on the race to the bottom literature, I examine the impact of the institutional arrangement centralization on state water quality in California, Texas, Virginia, and Minnesota. A five-year (2013-2018) permitting cycle was used to analyze five dimensions: formalism, coercion, education, prioritization, and accommodation.There is an inverse relationship between the quality of stormwater and the degree of centralization in the institutional arrangements adopted by state governments to implement their stormwater management policies. The second essay focuses on a local government's decision to join an inter-local agreement to comply with federal/state stormwater management policies. Building on the transaction cost framework, the study used a cross-sectional design to analyze a case study. The case study consists of 119 cities subjected to stormwater regulation requirements in northern Texas during 2017. The dependent variable is the membership of the regional inter-local agreement, and the independent variables are the number of neighboring cities and population density. Community wealth, public works spending, stormwater fees, government type, and the percent of the population over 65 were used as control variables. Logistic regression was used for data analysis. This study concludes that the increase in the number of neighboring regulated local governments is associated with an increase in the likelihood of a decision by the regulated local government to join an interlocal agreement (ILA), as well as finding that an increase in the population density is associated with an increase in the likelihood of a decision by the regulated local government to join the ILA. In addition, the study found that the type of government also affects a decision to enter into a cooperative relationship to meet the regulative burdens associated with implementing the stormwater management policies imposed by state/federal governments. The results found in this dissertation contribute to bridging the gap in our knowledge on the impact of the institutional framework adopted by the states to implement environmental policy through empirically evaluating the effect of institutional arrangements (as represented in the States general MS4 permits) on the policy output (reducing the level of stormwater pollution).