Choosing sides: Formation of regional partnership for economic development in metropolitan area and landscape theory of aggregation

Political fragmentation and the hyper-pluralism of the metropolitan area make it difficult to address more complicated issues such as economic development, income inequality, and growth management. In some metropolitan areas local governments have collectively developed a metropolitan civil society to combine the metropolis across multiple jurisdictions and to constitute the provision side of a local public economy. The new and innovative concept, “new regionalism” achieves these goals of promoting regional action through “governance,” which is defined as the use of inter-governmental collaboration rather than hierarchical regional government in order to resolve area-wide public issues. Although complexity of metropolitan areas induces local jurisdictions to be engaged in collaborative strategy, it is only a necessary condition for interlocal collaboration. Whom they decide to choose as a cooperation partners is another part of the story. Based on agent-based model the “landscape theory” by Axelrod provides a general theoretical background to predict aggregation pattern by putting highly compatible components together and less compatible components apart in social sciences. This “landscape theory” is applied to explain why regional development partnership alliances among local governments are successful in some metropolitan areas but not in others.