Interlocal Collaboration for Service Provision and Regional Planning in a Legacy City-Region Context

This article posits that the context of extreme population loss experienced by legacy cities presents an especially fraught challenge to interlocal collaboration and regionalism. The article fuses political science, public administration, and planning perspectives to develop hypotheses around how decline shapes the dynamics of interlocal collaboration for service provision and regional planning. We theorize that sustained decline heightens competition for scarce resources and produces more zero-sum games among local governments. Focusing on one legacy city-region in the United States—Northeast Ohio—we examine several hypotheses with respect to collaborative service provision using quantitative modeling of interlocal financial transfers. We also use an original survey of mayors and managers in one Northeast Ohio county to describe and analyze municipal engagement in collaborative regional planning. We then lay out a research agenda on these topics and a call for further study by scholars of urban politics, public administration, and planning.