boxes on a report—is a persistent problem for managers in the central office.

Capturing the reality of the activities in the

various field offices is critical information. Field offices, which communicate upward, view such reports as judgments of
performance, and will not view the central office with favor. Those reports have a single purpose and that is to transmit
information upward beyond the central office. This is not an effective tool for understanding what is happening.
Managers who fail to understand this are doomed to make the mistakes made in Ohio—initiating reforms at the field
level that were already being done in the field.

Peer-to-Peer Relationships

The second version of transboundary relations is peer-to-peer relations. Broadly this is the most common type of
transboundary interaction. These are interactions between and among persons with similar work responsibilities but
who work in different governments. These are relationships that may be formal, such as in regional (for example, a
water district or fire district) or informal such as in professional associations (county or state city manager groups). The
central feature here is that the persons come together because of common interests and common responsibilities. The
process may begin informally through a professional association and then become formal. Police and fire department
mutual aid pacts emerged over the decades before becoming the norm by the 1980s.

The central purposes of such relationships are two-fold: professional development and effective service delivery. Both
purposes have value. From a management perspective, providing time for others (and oneself) to participate in
professional associations and encouraging collaboration across governments are important. Innovation and effective
service delivery often emerge from such activities. The tendency of many governments to cut travel, training, and to
view collaboration as a waste of time is problematic.

While in the last few years there has been a focus on networks and collaborative efforts (see for example Agranoff, 2006;
Agranoff, 2017; LeRoux and Carr, 2005), the focus here is on the foundational influences of peer-to-peer interactions.
Not every opportunity for collaboration is a success (O’Toole, 2012, nevertheless the beginning of a successful
relationship is the existence of a prior social relationship. We tend to talk to acquaintances, not strangers.

Special districts and regional governing organizations are the most common form of formal peer-to-peer relationship for
service delivery. Although they exist in every part of the country, the most common formats of such structures are in
urban or metropolitan areas. As a sociological term, “city” is interchangeable with “metropolitan region” in that both
terms mean an urbanized area with many jobs and people living therein. When “city” is used in a politico-legal sense,
the terms are not interchangeable, even though the need to make more public decisions at the regional level is
becoming self-evident. Today’s metropolitan regions have nascent characteristics of the politico-legal city (Miller and
Cox, 2011, 2014). There are several reasons for this approach. First, the metropolitan region has replaced the city as the
conceptual unit in which people live and business is conducted. Second, it permits a better frame for discussion of the
structured relationship between the institutions of government and governing. By that we mean there is a vertical
relationship, in terms of the governing context created by the state in which the metropolitan region exists, and a
horizontal dimension or the relationship between the institutions of government that exist within a metropolitan region
(discussed in more detail below).

The study of the governing of metropolitan regions is framed by acknowledging a conceptual distinction between
government and governance. There have been broad societal changes over the last half century that have had
pronounced effects on how we think about and operate in our world. As those changes relate to the public sphere, we
are moving from a paradigm centered on government to one centered on governing or governance. Governing is the act
of public decision-making and is no longer the exclusive domain of governments. Indeed, governments at all levels,
nonprofit organizations, and the private sector now work together in new partnerships and relationships that blur
sectoral lines. Private businesses, under contract to governments, deliver a wide variety of governmental programs.
Conversely, governments are often managing more private-sector firms than public-sector employees. Nonprofit
organizations, often representing organizations of governments, are partnering with governments, private firms, and
other nonprofits to deliver services. Private foundations in many metropolitan regions utilize revenues generated from
the private sector to finance public, private, and nonprofit organizations in addressing important regional public
problems.

There is a structure to the patterns of relationships that exist within metropolitan regions (Miller and Lee, 2011). This
structure has three primary dimensions. The first is a vertical dimension. Most of the activity falls within the domain of
the state. The states have adopted a wide range of strategies in their treatment of local governing institutions. Some
states take a relatively hands-off approach and leave much of the design and execution of local governing in the hands
of localities. Other states take a relatively authoritarian approach and more directly control the design and function of
local governments. A second dimension is horizontal and involves the fundamental relationships between the
municipalities within a metropolitan area. Municipalities are relatively equal in the eyes of the law and custom. They
have grants of authority to undertake a number of functions, the power of taxation to implement the desires of its
citizens, and the land-use authority to control the nature and direction of development within the community.
Municipalities are the building blocks of metropolitan areas and their relationship (or lack thereof) to each other is the
key variable in determining whether meaningful regional decision-making can occur and how it will occur. The third is
also horizontal but involves the fundamental relationships between important governing institutions within a
metropolitan area. As such, it captures the emerging notion of metropolitan governance (see Foster, 1997; Foster and
Barnes, 2012). In addition to local governments it includes the other principal types of local governments, such as
counties, special districts, and school districts. Of the three, some county governments come closest to municipalities