Who Governs? Public, Private, Community, Civic, and Knowledge Actors in Place Governance

Abstract

This chapter is part of a book that examines the different forms of place-based (“hyperlocal”) governance structures in the United States and around the globe. The book illustrates how these structures have been both part of the problem and part of the solution to the need to bring inclusive economic growth and prosperity to more people and places. The place-based organizations featured in the book range from community land trusts to business improvement districts to neighborhood councils. The book is designed to address a research gap in the literature on place-based organizations. There is a lack of systemic research that documents the full diversity and evolution of these organizations as part of one interrelated field. Hyperlocal helps fill that gap by describing the challenges and opportunities of “place governance.”

This particular chapter dissects four distinct models of place governance with differing mixes of private, public, and community leadership and involvement to examine who governs, what is at stake, and how tensions and trade-offs arise in each case. These tensions and trade-offs are explored through the lens of several place-based governance arrangements, which range from a narrow set of actors on one end to a broad and inclusive set of actors on the other. The typologies along this spectrum include private governance, public-private partnerships, public-community governance, and public-private-community (plus) partnerships. The diversity of these arrangements, even within the same part of the spectrum, resists easy conclusions about their desirability absent a full assessment of each within a particular context, which is beyond the scope of the chapter. However, the chapter does make general observations about the potential benefits and costs of different place-based governance arrangements, the types of actors initiating and shaping these arrangements, and the kind of authority they are given or obtain over the places they govern.

https://www.brookings.edu/book/hyperlocal/.

Keywords: place governance, placemaking, urban development, community development, land use, governance, urban commons, local governance