In this article, the authors develop a political market framework to explain the circumstances under which Florida counties will supply environmental public goods in the form of conservation amendments to county general plans. The framework emphasizes the role of local legislative and executive institutions as mediators of local policy change. Using count models and interaction terms, the analysis shows how the strength of real estate interests constrains the ability of professional county managers to pursue conservation policies. The findings reinforce the importance of developing theories of urban politics in which local political institutions are not transparent.

This research investigates why various mechanisms of cooperation among local authorities are chosen using the theoretical lens of institutional collective action ( ICA ). The article analyzes 564 local collaboration agreements drawn from four urban regions of China to explain the choices of environmental collaboration agreements among cities. Examples of three forms of interlocal agreements-informal, formal, and imposed agreements-are analyzed. Ordinal logistic regressions are estimated to test which factors predicted by the ICA framework influence the form of collaboration selected. The results indicate that the involvement of national or provincial government, the number of policy actors involved, heterogeneity of economic conditions, and differences in administrative level among the actors involved influence how collaboration agreements are structured. Examining the choice of agreement type contributes to the understanding of interlocal collaboration and provides practical insights for public managers to structure interlocal collaboration. Evidence for Practice• Informal, formal, and imposed agreements are available to public managers seeking to address regional problems. • Local managers should be attentive to local economic conditions and characteristics of policy actors in choosing specific types of agreements. • The number of policy actors involved is an important consideration in deciding on agreement type.

Over the last few decades, European countries have dealt with problems of regional governance in very different ways. A common theme is the debate between supporters of local government mergers to expand the capacity and efficiency in service provision and those favoring local government autonomy and self-determination to protect democracy and government responsiveness. The significant number of scholarly contributions to this debate between mergers and fragmentation contrasts with the scarcity of theoretical attention to decentralized self-organizing mechanisms. This article fills this lacuna by developing an extension of the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework for the European context. The framework defines two dimensions to understand intermunicipal cooperation: the type of urban integration mechanism (imposed authority, delegated authority, contracts, or social embeddedness) and the degree of institutional scope (narrow, intermediate or complex). The resulting typology composed by 12 cells is illustrated with examples of intermunicipal cooperation for solving governance dilemmas in the European setting. We advance theoretical propositions rooted in historical, cultural, and institutional differences to explain the variation in the adoption of intermunicipal cooperation by Northern versus Southern as well as Eastern versus Western European countries. A research agenda using the ICA framework is advanced for framing the studies of regional governance in Europe.

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