Book Description

How can regional organizations create differences in coordination and planning decisions based on their organizational and institutional makeup? As metropolitan areas are increasingly expanding beyond the geographical and political boundaries of the local level, Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs) have been theorized as a mitigation tool to calming fragmentations of authority at the local level. While literature of the organizations is new, there has been evidence that regional organizations are creating an impact when connecting local and state level organizations to a unified plan handling a wicked problem. A gap in regional literature currently is a specialized look into a standardized group of regional organizations, required to complete specific tasks yet are allowed the freedom to decide on supplemental areas if needed. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are an example of one such version of regional organizations, a regional organization created by the federal government to provide several standardized documents that fiscally constrain all transportation planning projects within the region. Previous data gathering of these organizations has varied between gathering of several states or of specific regions, only providing minor views of MPOs that may contain differences based on the location or region the MPO is inches In this manuscript, the research has created a national MPO database of all 400+ MPOs within the United States; the information contained includes organizational and institutional makeup of the organization, state influences, interregional partnerships, and goal and objective setting language within their required transportation plan documentation. This dissertation fills further gaps in regional literature and collective action scenarios by examining the local effects of the MPO, its coordination with similar regional entities, and the influences that come upon MPOs when creating long range transportation plans. The research findings suggest that: (1) there are influences of the MPO at the local government level in terms of adoption risk of sustainability plans; (2) that regional to regional coordination is affected by similar risks that local level entities may face; (3) that there are noticeable effects of institutional and organizational pressures towards transportation plan language in regards to sustainability goal and objective setting. Together these studies add important literature to the field of RIGOs, further expanding upon the burgeoning area of research the effects of regional organizations and their inner machinations.