Policies and services in communities and regions increasingly confront externalities in which one authority's decisions have major unanticipated impacts on other authorities and their constituencies. A multitude of innovative institutions have evolved within our decentralized federalist system to coordinate policies and mitigate the resultant collective action dilemmas, many of which are self-organizing institutions developed by those affected by such dilemmas. This volume is premised on two beliefs: first, an integrated approach to analyze the multitude of self-organizing institutions is necessary to understand the potential benefits and limitations of these institutions in enhancing the efficiency of federalist governance; second, a better understanding will accelerate the evolution of self-organizing institutions as an integral part of our federalist system, thereby expanding the system's ability to mitigate a broader range of institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas without threatening the safeguards of a robust federalism.

Our first chapter outlined an ICA framework for addressing three critical questions about these mitigating mechanisms:

• How does the mechanism reduce transaction costs in obtaining the benefits of coordinated decisions?

• What incentives do potential members have to create the mechanism?

• How do the incentives induced by the mechanism affect its sustainability, its adaptability to other ICAs, and its overall impact on the system of formal authority?

In this final chapter we summarize the basic findings from the remaining chapters about the circumstances under which alternatives to formal centralized structures will emerge and be successful.

Dramatic change has occurred in the last two decades in how governments carry out public policies. In our complex, interconnected, and information-dense world, policy problems increasingly transcend the jurisdictional boundaries of governments and their specialized agencies at all levels (Scholz and Stiftel 2005; Donahue 2006). Examples abound of agencies working across jurisdictions, across levels of government, across agencies, and across sectors (Bardach 1998; Milward and Provan 2000; Linden 2002). Rhodes (2007) argues that in Britain privatization and dispersion of authority have transferred policy coordination functions from the central state to decentralized and informal policy networks. Kettl (2002) describes this as a “transformation of governance” characterized in the United States by the emergence of collaborative institutions in which multiple agencies, governments, and other stakeholders work together to solve problems that affect them.

This volume introduces and develops the institutional collective action (ICA) framework to understand the challenges for governance imposed by the forces of globalization that exacerbate the negative consequences of fragmentation of authority, particularly in federalist systems in which fragmentation is an inevitable aspect of the allocation of formal authority. ICA applies the framework of collective action, initially developed to explain individual behavior, to institutionally defined composite actors such as local governments or government agencies and their constituencies. Fragmented authority produces dilemmas for institutional actors whenever decisions by one authority affect outcomes of other authorities, particularly when independent decisions by each authority lead to poor policy outcomes not favored by anyone: uncoordinated investments by local governments create excessive capacity and expensive service provisions; one authority's regulations undermine the effectiveness of another's; one agency's project competes with that of another agency rather than complementing it.

Fragmentation of formal authority and the self-organizing activities to resolve the collective problems imposed by fragmentation are enduring traits of governance in the United States (Tocqueville2003). As policy problems and underlying resource systems become increasingly interconnected, the decisions of one government or independent agency inevitably affect outcomes of concern to the other units. In contemporary societies, the scope and magnitude of unconsidered positive and negative externalities increase as technologies extend the nature and number of public goods while growing economies and populations strain the limits and interconnections of natural systems, particularly in areas where rapid development and growth exceed the capacities of natural systems and therefore dramatically magnify interactions between different policies and authorities (Scholz and Stiftel 2005). This imposes collective action dilemmas on government authorities similar to those much-studied problems for individuals. The costs that these institutional collective action (ICA) problems impose on local actors have generated intensive search for institutions that can coordinate decisions across interdependent policy arenas without threatening the stability and advantages of our decentralized federalist political system.

Recognition of this problem brought the editors together to ask what mechanisms have evolved for dealing with fragmented authority and the resultant collective action problems, and what we know about them. Stated another way, how can local authorities organize themselves to obtain collective benefits of policy coordination when faced with uncertainty and commitment problems associated with collective dilemmas?

Feiock and Scholz have been independently working on issues related to this question for several years.