governance « Kristin Wolff

Tag: governance

World Bank Innovative Cities Symposium: Three Take-aways

Via Networked Publics »

Last week, I participate in a two-day event that brought together researchers, thinkers, urban leaders, policy professionals, and social innovators to share strategies for strengthening regional economies and improving the quality of life in the world's urban regions. Graciously hosted by Keshav Varma, Head of the World Bank Institute's Urban Program, the Innovative Cities' agenda was organized around the theme of competitiveness, but covered a wide range of challenges urban leaders face: intra-regional competition, social inclusiveness, positioning on the value chain, "smart" policies, transport and infrastructure capacity, and cultivating a healthy business climate.

Unfortunately, I had to leave for a flight just prior to the last panel – the summary panel. So I will offer my own top takeaways, based on no criteria other than personal resonance. I have not been able to stop thinking about these issues since I left the symposium.

1. Jurisdictional boundaries are rarely aligned with where problems need solving, but collaborative approaches can make a real difference.

The first panel (on intra-urban competition) featured economic developers and urban planners from the Washington, DC region: Gerald Gordon (Executive Director, Fairfax County Virginia Economic Development Authority), Steve Silverman (Director, Montgomery County Maryland Department of Economic Development), and Richard Reinhard (Deputy Executive Director, Downtown DC Business Improvement District). After a brief presentation from each on their approaches to development and key priorities, moderators Stephen Fuller (Center for Regional Analysis, George Mason University) and Greg Clark

(OECD, LEEDs Program) began asking hard questions about shared strategies and significant challenges. Transportation surfaced immediately, as did the incentive structures and institutional barriers to collaboration on long-term (read: expensive and shared) priorities. Rich Reinhard (attributing the framing to his boss) offered the following insight:

"Our policy and program tools exist at three levels: federal, state local. Our problems exist at three different levels: global, regional, neighborhood."

Therein lies the problem.

At the risk of sounding like I've got a hammer and have discovered a bevy of nails, I have since come to see so many contexts in which this misalignment impedes shared action: jobs policy, site selection/location, educational cachement areas, investments in higher education or business support programs, etc. Government services (and the policies that drive them) are nearly always tied to jurisdictions in ways that inhibit scale and discourage broad, public participation through which creative solutions can emerge.

A specific example was raised in the room: a DC-commuter admitted "slugging" (essentially, organized hitch-hiking to DC from northern Virginia) and wanted to know (quite rightly) why it is illegal and what the alternatives might be.

At one level, this is a commuter-specific issue economic development professionals tend not to want to spend their time addressing (imagine the safety and liability issues...). But it is also an example of a larger pattern of citizen-led innovation (enabled by technology among other things) that could inform regional policy approaches on transport and other issues. So many citizen-led innovations emerge as neighborhood-based social practices (and occupy a legal grey zone), that it is hard to link them to policy making, let alone share them across a region. Moreover, this is the kind of innovation that can be shared any any direction – advanced economies have as much or more to learn from emerging ones as the other way around.

This speaks to new role of leaders - it's less about being the one with the solution, and more about knowing how to cultivate, test, and grow ideas that work (see reivew of Open Leadership for more on this subject) collaboratively, at different levels, and on different time horizons.

2. We need many more conversations about the enabling role of technology in helping cities thrive (citizens and residents, not just governments) so that we can inspire new models of governance and leadership.

Relina Bulchandani (Cisco Smart + Connected Communities initiative, of which this blog is a part), Gerard Mooney (IBM Global Government & Education), and Debra Lam (ARUP) made important presentations about how shared data and information platforms, systems (and sensors) integrated into the built environment can change what's possible for city leaders trying to manage extremely complex systems.

Relina's presentation emphasized how ubiquitous connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices give us the potential to reimagine many aspects of work, learning, commerce, and life. By partnering with cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam to redesign urban information architectures, Cisco is helping city leaders reinvent the way they collect data, turn it into intelligence they can act upon, and share it with citizens and residents who can apply it (and contribute to it) too.

Gerald described similar partnerships with urban environments in the context of IBM's SmarterPlanet initiative, an effort to help cities get smarter about systems that support water, health, public safety, and transport, and begin to place citizens at the center of their work.

ARUP is an employee-owned engineering and design firm helping to green the built environment. Debra's presentation focused on measurement and feedback systems in the built environment that can help influence behaviors of people and communities. She offered some terrific visualizations that made evident why data transparency and presentation matter. When her slidedeck is made available, I will link it here.

Debra was also the first speaker to champion middle managers and experienced civil servants. While most of the symposium focsed on leaders and leadership, she argued that it is middle managers that make things work – these doers should not be overlooked as key agents of large-scale metropolitan change efforts.

3. We're not just reinventing strategies and tactics, but our fundamental approach to economic competitiveness and urban development.

Bruce Katz, Director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, launched the Symposium with some key observations about cities:

They will drive the next economy and create low-carbon ways to work and live.
They will grow in importance (because urban migration is increasing worldwide).
They will insist on new approaches to common, urgent challenges like long-term infrastructure planning, trade policy, and regional development.

Many other speakers used these as a foundation for their own observations about important changes within and across cities – growth, aging, poverty, access issues (energy, water, food), etc. – and described approaches to their key challenges.

But competing paradigms did emerge, provoked in particular by Bijal Bhatt (SEWA), Deputy Mayor Jerry William Silaa (Dar es Salaam), Michael Joroff (MIT), TIm Campbell (UrbanAge) and Melanie Walker (Gates Foundation):

Are we building clusters or making places? How are these agenda linked?/li>li>What role does human capital play in development?
Is competitiveness about growth or about broader indicators of health, soul, and prosperity?
Is development about sharing lessons from the US and Europe with the rest of the world, or about co-creating and sharing new models for sustainable working and living?
Do leaders make places or do citizens?
How do cities learn from each other (who doe the learning?)
How do we think about integrating the poor in development strategies? Are there things leaders need to do differently to ensure engagement?
How do we start measuring/comparing true costs of development, resource extraction?
How do we scale approaches that work (and does that mean replicate? grow? network? or something else?)
When (and how) are we going to integrate citizens and residents in not just policy review, but actual implementation – engaging citizens in placemaking as we do leaders?

We began defiing components of a "new operating system" for cities of the future.

And that's when I had to leave. I'd be grateful if another attendee could summarize the last session in the comments below. I will attach any materials I receive in the next week or so to this post.

Many thanks to Sabine Palmreuther, Jennie Datoo, Narmeen Iftikhar, Damon Luciano, Kashev Varma, and everyone else at the World Bank who helped organize the event, and the speakers and attendees who made it come alive

Getting Strategic About Skills

Via Start, Grow, Transform » Kristin Wolff »

Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo Romaní in Flickr.

NOTE: This is the third in our recent “let’s share the findings from all those OECD reports with each other (and the world)” series. Again, the content is not likely scintillating, but it’s important to us, and we’re happy to let you in on it.

The OECD Designing Local Skills Strategies Report (2009) focuses largely on questions of balance in locally designed workforce strategies: balance between short- and long-terms needs, balance between training and placement, balance between meeting the needs of people, firms, and communities, and balance between workforce players – private, non-profit, and a diverse collection of government agencies at different levels.

Authors Francesca Froy, Sylvain Giguère, and Andrea Hofer offer case studies of the following communities:

Shanghai (China)
Michigan (U.S.)
Choctaw Tribe (Mississippi, U.S.)
Mackay (Australia)
Malmö (Sweden)
New York City (New York, U.S.)

While, other communities are also cited in the narrative, these communities’ launched initiatives representing what the report calls balanced strategies, the authors’ recommended approach. Balanced strategies focus simultaneously on:

Attracting and retaining talent
Integrating disadvantaged groups
Upskilling those in employment – though in most cases, this was the most difficult strategy because of its complexity (designing opportunities for working adults, often with families).

The report concludes by recommending that local workforce actors seeking to implement effective (and balanced) approaches focus on five key strategic issues:

Access to relevant data and information. Local actors need to understand their “skills ecology” and its impact on the wider economy to be able to design appropriate policy and program interventions.
Balanced and long term strategies. It is tempting for local actors to focus on only one or two strategic objectives. Focusing on all three areas is more difficult, but also promises to deliver more substantive impact over time.
Batter mapping of skills provision, for example through “career clusters” or “career ladders.” This provide a focus for otherwise disjointed systems and creates opportunities for individuals to advance in meaningful ways. However, careers advice is a key (and often lacking) component of this approach.
Building strong relationships with employers. While necessary to ensure effective connecting of supply and demand, public-sector and non-profit entities can play an important role in emphasizing long term needs and suggesting changes in workplace practices in ways that round out employer’s tendency to focus on short-term needs.
Look to the future and anticipate change. Skills strategies should be subject to regular review and change, and should build toward local areas of “flexible specialization” (sometimes called workforce or talent competencies, or clusters of talent) that encourage the development of local talents and skills that are specific enough to make the community distinctive, but broad enough to avoid dependency on narrow industries or occupations.

Not rocket science, but it does take determination – people who do this work rely on persuasion and trust, not hierarchy.

Leadership and Governance Really Matter

While the report does not emphasize leadership and governance as a theme, the frequency with which the difficulty of this work is noted in the narrative is striking. Meeting many diverse public and private needs, balancing the short and longterm, collaborating with large and changing networks of partners absent a structure, meeting shared national policy needs and in a local (and sometime divergent) context, developing and allocating resources fairly and in ways that deliver results – this is complex work all over the world, and speaks to the level of management expertise and leadership talent it takes to do well.

What’s our strategy for developing the workforce workforce?

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What We Know About Regional Economic Growth, Innovation, and Recovery

Via Start, Grow, Transform » Kristin Wolff »

NOTE: We’ll be be posting findings from a few papers we’re reviewing with the intent of sharing with colleagues. We’re doing this here so that you might benefit from them too, but wanted to warn you before you read too far.

We just reviewed Regions Matter (OECD, November 2009). It’s chalk full of bits and bobs we’d picked up (and learned ourselves) while studying, conducting research, or providing technical assistance to stakeholders in regions, but offers a difference level of coherence than we’ve seen in some time. We thought we might share.

Key Policy Messages about Regional Economies and Development (the “Big Picture”)

The intent of regional policies is evolving: they are increasingly about fueling growth and not just limiting (or reducing) disparities.
There is no consistent relationship between urban concentration and economic performance – simply concentrating resources in a place does not necessarily lead to growth.
Public policy matters in maximizing the potential of assets in regions.
Leading and lagging regions are both important – when lagging regions improve, they make important contributions to growth and equity, opportunity.
The use of productive assets (labor, capital, technology) are correlated with growth, but no single factor explains improved performance in a region. It is the interaction and interdependence of key assets that matters (suggesting flexible and integrated policy approaches).
Investment and governance are important dimensions of regional innovation and change, but there is no blueprint for these. Policy should be developed in the context of the specific assets a particular region offers.
Research- and technology-driven innovation is highly concentrated, but public policy can impact growth and capacity in regions with assets in emerging fields.
Innovation policy is not just about inventing the next new technology, but also about its adoption or application. Different regions have different innovation assets and can and should develop these based on their unique capacities. Some regions will invent; others will deploy or scale.
Innovation capacity is moving East (to Asia, where there are high concentrations of skilled labor and dense supplier networks). This mean regions in OECD countries must be mindful of how they develop knowledge capital that allows them to compete.
Rural regions offer innovation potential but in different ways – social innovation around environmental issues, better public services (on which most rural areas are highly dependent), and new cooperative arrangements for living, working, and managing communities hold promise.
Sustainable urban growth is widely recognized as a key policy priority.
Regional policy is difficult to manage at the national level. It would benefit from coordination and multi-year co-financing.
Learning, knowledge-sharing, monitoring and evaluation need to be coordinated across levels of government.

What turns places with concentrations of assets into agglomeration economies? (from Krugman, 1991)

The sharing of unique, place-based facilities (labs, universities, creative space, etc.)
Gains from producing complementary products in a wider array of facilities
Gains from a wider array of suppliers (and supply chain connectivity)
Deeply and broadly skilled labor reduces risk of adjusting to market shocks
Matching mechanisms (connecting workers and jobs, suppliers and purchasers, distributers with buyers and sellers, etc.)
Learning mechanisms based on the generation, diffusion, accumulation of knowledge and the systems that cultivate and disseminate it.

Results of OECD Growth Model Analysis

Human capital and innovation positively influence regional growth (as traditional growth theories suggest).
Elements from new economic geography theories (e.g. agglomeration economies) are also relevant and reveal a spatial connection to growth.
Infrastructure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth – it is only relevant if human capital and innovation are also present.

Time also matters in regional development efforts…

Infrastructure and human capital shifts require three years to positively influence growth
Innovation is even longer-term, netting positive effects after five years.

Governance in Regions

Regional development depends on efficient governance. Accountable and credible leadership is important, but it looks different than a generation ago:

It’s network-based, not organization based.
It’s championed by collaborative leaders, not individual heroes.
It’s more likely to be university or public sector-based than private sector based (and that’s okay, as the attention of private sector leaders is now often global, not local).
It manifests in shared public-private ventures that can take a variety of forms.

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