Building Development Capacity in Nonmetropolitan Communities

Abstract

The primary responsibility for economic growth and survival has gradually shifted from the national government to communities and their local governments. Whereas the previous two decades saw the rapid emergence of subnational economic development strategies (Rubin and Zorn, 1985; Eisinger, 1988; Osborne, 1988; Fosler, 1988), the 1990s appear to be an era in which a more sophisticated application of these insights, commonly referred to as locality-based development or self-development, has become the objective of many communities (Fosler, 1989; Blakely, 1989; Gittell, 1990; Fosler, 1991). As a result, the development capacity of communities becomes a prime determinant of economic, and thus governmental, performance. Capacity has long been identified as an important correlate of effective governance. Concern with capacity in the public administration literature has typically focused on general issues of management and administration. The rapid devolution of legal powers and administrative responsibilities to subnational units of government over the last few decades has left some localities ill-prepared and unequipped to meet the demands placed on them in the complex intergovernmental system (Liner, 1989; Honadle and Howitt, 1986). Traditional concerns with administrative efficiency and effective service delivery have in many cases been supplanted by the demands placed on communities for new jobs, higher personal incomes, and new infrastructure. Nowhere is the issue of insufficient development capacity more prevalent than in rural and other small communities (Reeder, 1989; Hustedde, 1991; Reed and Paulsen, 1991; Walzer and Gruidl, 1991; Sears et al., 1992). These newcomers to American federalism (Sokolow, 1987) usually lack the political will and skill of larger governments (Reid, 1986), are less well off according to the usual standards of organizational and managerial capacity (Sokolow, 1989), and seldom possess the scale to implement the kinds of development projects demanded in the larger economic environment (Mead, 1986). Development for small communities, in addition to requiring those administrative skills commonly available in larger communities (such as grant writing and acquisition, information systems, and financial management), must focus on overcoming the problems of small-scale, low-density population, isolation, specialization of local economies, and the relative lack of human and financial resources (Deavers, 1992; Lapping, Daniels, and Keller, 1989). As a result, the important contributions that have been made in developing and applying the tools and skills associated with building government capacity (Gargan, 1981; Mead, 1981, 1986; Honadle, 1981) must be expanded to account for the new role of governance as an instrument of economic performance (Fosler, 1992). In this article, we address the issue of development capacity by presenting the preliminary results of an evaluation of a strategic development planning program implemented in 12 small, nonmetropolitan communities located in the midwestern United States. The evaluation model focuses on assessing the effectiveness of strategic planning as a capacity building instrument. Community capacity is viewed as an intermediate and direct outcome of a development planning process that is likely to lead to economic development. The objective of this research is to determine whether strategic development planning contributes to building the kind of capacity that contemporary development theory posits is necessary for implementing a self-development effort. Although the previous research upon which our capacity measures are based assumes a strong correlation between the level of community capacity and the subsequent amount of development activity in that community, the model used in this research explores only the initial linkage between strategic planning and community capacity. To ensure that the capacity development outcomes emerging from the evaluation studies are a function of the planning effort in each community, we also investigated 12 additional matched-pair control communities that had not experienced any community-wide strategic planning. …