Regional Governance
Finally, the nation’s interest in ensuring that its metros deliver on their boundless potential–combined with the internal fragmentation and fractiousness of most of them–requires a national push to encourage regional leaders to cooperate across city, suburb, and county lines to make the most of the prosperity driving assets they gather.
The federal government should lead by applying a sort of regionalism "steer" to essentially all of its activities, especially the scores of categorical, block, and other grant flows. Today, these flows often intensify local governance fragmentation. With the attachment of modest incentives for regionalization in the form of extra funding, these flows could promote more effective metropolitan governance systems and problem-solving at very low cost. Likewise, a small portion of a region’s entitlement to funds could be subtracted if it chose not to embrace regionalism.
But that’s the nudge from Washington. The nation should also incentivize localities to figure regionalization out for themselves by issuing a bold, large challenge–call it a Governance Challenge–to localities to get their acts together and collaborate. The Governance Challenge would encourage and reward coordination across any wide swath of program areas, from social services or land-use planning to fiscal management, in exchange for modest financial rewards or (perhaps more attractive to localities) greater programmatic flexibility.
The federal government should also maximize the achievement and spread of governance innovation by supporting state-of-the-art knowledge-building and best-practice diffusion. That means rebuilding our deteriorating government statistics infrastructure by fully funding the Census; expanding electronic information-sharing networks between federal, state, and local governments and the private sector; and finding better ways to track federal expenditures like grants and contracts.
Beyond that, Washington should create a vehicle for sharing and disseminating integrated local governance innovations and supporting a national conversation about such work. Many groups of leaders and municipalities in metros want to collaborate but lack relevant models and are left having to reinvent the wheel. To fill the gap, Washington should work with leading corporate, civic, and philanthropic organizations to develop a new national forum–a Metro Innovations Network–tasked specifically with assessing, diffusing, and promoting the best and most creative regional policy integration breakthroughs.
Rethinking Federalism
MetroPolicy can be thought of as one more iteration of the "federalism bargain"–the nation’s continuously renegotiated squaring of centralization and localism. Federalism has lasted because it is dynamic. Powers and responsibilities constantly shift between different levels of government–including localities–in response to the social, economic, environmental, and political imperatives of different eras. Over time, a decentralized nation centralized, prompted by wars and the Great Depression; then, beginning in the 1970s, new conditions brought a new drift toward devolution and state creativity.
Now, it is time–not least because of the current economic freefall–to adjust U.S. federalism and governance once more. Even as early as 1940, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. saw this time coming, and noted that the rise of metropolitan areas would require a revision of federalism. "These urban provinces," he wrote, "new to the American scene, possess greater economic, social, and cultural unity than most of the states. Yet, subdivided into separate municipalities and often lying in more than one state, they face grave difficulties in meeting the essential needs of the aggregate population…It is clear that new and unanticipated strains are being placed on the federal system framed by the Fathers for a simple agricultural economy."
Seventy years later, the strains Schlesinger noted have only grown, and they must to be addressed if the American system is going to function in the future. It is these strains that cry for a new version of the federalism bargain. Metropolitan areas are the hub of our economy, and their strengths will, if properly tended to and harnessed, help pull us out of the current economic disarray. In so tending to them, we have a chance to reinvigorate, for our own time, the federalism our Founders bequeathed us. Our times require, and will reward, such boldness. 
