Expanding Intergovernmental Management’s Hidden Dimensions

Abstract

The practice of intergovernmental management is widespread in application but poorly understood. The empirical study of economic policy making and administration reported here suggests that the role of the intergovernmental manager has expanded considerably beyond the familiar tasks of seeking funds from other governments, coping with an expanding regulatory burden, or developing interlocal cooperative agreements. Linking data from two different surveys, the authors offer a preliminary classification of intergovernmental management activities and report the use of each formal activity. Such a classification is useful not only for identifying specific managerial functions that are conducted through multiple actors, but also for the terminology that can be applied to actions that heretofore have been heaped together under a generic intergovernmental management label. The increasingly more prevalent intergovernmental management activity is thus viewed as a routine aspect of public administration and, as such, requires a more complete understanding of its practice.