Do local governments compete or cooperate for resiliency? The case of state spending in Colorado

Abstract

Management of urban resilience requires both individual action and coordination between multiple governments sharing common geographic jurisdictions. Where strong intergovernmental networks exist, governments with low capacity may be able to enhance their capabilities by depending on larger governments. We hypothesize that local governments will be most likely to participate in planning, preparing, and recovery from disasters when they have network connections to governments with experience in resiliency programs. We use the case of resiliency funding in Colorado to test this hypothesis. The Colorado Department of Local Affairs maintains competitive grant funding for programs to enhance resiliency efforts. We utilize supervised machine learning to identify grants that target resiliency. Using resiliency grant funding as the outcome of interest, we leverage a Bayesian spatial lag model to assess how capacity and experience of overlapping governments in grant programs is associated with differing probabilities of governments achieving funding in the period from 2010 to 2018. The results demonstrate that grant-winning experience of geographically overlapping governments is negatively correlated with future funding of other nearby governments; however, local administrative capacity of other governments in the previous time period is associated with increased funding.