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Coercive versus cooperative policies: Comparing intergovernmental mandate performance
Author(s) -
May Peter J.,
Burby Raymond J.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of policy analysis and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.898
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1520-6688
pISSN - 0276-8739
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1520-6688(199621)15:2<171::aid-pam2>3.0.co;2-g
Subject(s) - mandate , dilemma , local government , government (linguistics) , public administration , state (computer science) , compliance (psychology) , federalism , public economics , economics , business , political science , law , psychology , social psychology , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , algorithm , politics , computer science
Cooperative policies hold out promise of an improvement over coercive mandates as ways to enhance implementation of intergovernmental programs. By treating subordinate governments as regulatory trustees and emphasizing substantive compliance, the cooperative mandates avoid the onerous aspects of heavy‐handed regulatory federalism. Our comparison of state hazard‐mitigation policy in Florida and in New South Wales, Australia addresses procedural and substantive compliance under the two forms of intergovernmental policies. When local governments are not committed to state policy objectives, the coercive policy produces better results as evidenced by higher rates of procedural compliance and greater effort by local governments to achieve policy objectives. When local government commitment exists, the cooperative policy produces substantive results that are at least the equivalent to the coercive policy. Moreover, over the long run cooperative policies may have greater promise in sustaining local government commitment. The dilemma is to figure out how to motivate lagging jurisdictions that seem to require a coercive policy, while not straightjacketing leading jurisdictions that are capable of thriving under a cooperative regime.