In Partnership with the World:
A Profile of the International City/County
Management Association
By Deborah M.S. Brown
NEW AMSTERDAM, Guyana, a city in one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, has become a partner with Huntsville, one of the oldest cities in the state of Texas. The purpose of this partnership is to turn New Amsterdam into a "healthy community," a designation that is part of an approach to create consensus and engage citizens in improving the community's quality of life through partnerships with local and national government, NGOs, citizens' groups, and the private sector.
Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in the foothills of the Balkan Mountains, has joined forces with Portage, Michigan, in the southern part of the state, to develop more citizen participation, economic development, and public-private partnerships in order to increase citizen awareness and understanding of municipal services.
Haiphong, Vietnam, the third largest city in the country and capital of Haiphong Province, and Seattle, Washington, home to the computer software giant Microsoft, work together in promoting Haiphong's tourism and business investment strategies. The partnership also encompasses a wider spectrum of organizations in Seattle's educational community, as well as the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership and the World Bank.
In partnership with the U.S. National Forum for Black Public Administrators, the Urban Councils Association of Zimbabwe seeks training, information sharing, and networking opportunities to bring together local governments, so that the next generation can become responsible leaders and prepare citizens to rebuild economic and governmental infrastructures.
All of these cities have one thing in common: they have been brought together under the guidance of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), a professional and educational organization for local government managers, administrators and assistants in cities, towns, counties and other regional entities throughout the world.
Formed in 1914, ICMA first provided technical and management assistance, training and information resources to its members and local government communities throughout the United States reflecting the ideals of the Progressive Movement, which advocated social and political changes throughout the country. These changes, often enacted in federal legislation-and relating to such issues as wages and employment, safety and health in factories, and employment of women and children-were a reaction to the late 19th and early 20th century forms of American local government. During this era large cities were often controlled by corrupt politicians called,“bosses,” who basically ran cities as their own personal fiefdoms.
"Between 1880 and 1920, municipal governments in the U.S. were often decentralized and fragmented, not the unified city government structures we think of today," says Dennis Taylor, director of international programs at ICMA. "These governments became prime targets for domination by centralized political machines that helped fill the vacuum and ensured service delivery. The goal of the municipal reform movement was 'good government,' meaning cities free of graft, corruption, patronage and the spoils associated with the bosses and machines."
ICMA flourished in the U.S. for seven decades before deciding that cities and other regional areas abroad might benefit from its programs. "The international program was developed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening up of Eastern Europe," Taylor says. ICMA then decided to organize programs that would pair cities, counties, regions, and organizations in the U.S. with their counterparts abroad. "Although we do work in other places around the world, that was the impetus for getting us into the international arena," Taylor adds.
CityLinks
In order to bring people together, ICMA collaborates primarily with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) through a series of programs that use contracts, cooperative agreements or grants to pair cities. One such program is called CityLinks (formerly called Resource Cities), which focuses on enhancing basic public services, including environmental management, financial management, economic development and health. The practical experience of U.S. local government officials provides invaluable assistance to their international counterparts, many of whom have limited experience working in a decentralized government that requires responsibility, initiative, and accountability.
ICMA facilitates these partnerships by providing technical assistance to developing-country cities through a peer-to-peer approach, with the help of USAID missions. "USAID missions around the world request our assistance where they find a particular local government, or maybe two or three, in a country that they think would benefit from a direct relationship with a U.S. city of similar size," Taylor says. "So they ask us: Do you have managers, public works directors, budget directors and cities of about this size who have done something on this problem area? We're really trying to match up comparable-sized communities with comparable issues."
Before ICMA agrees to take on a project, however, it sends an assessment team to a requesting city or country. "We send a team out to first find what the issues on the ground are, what the viability of really working with these people is," Taylor notes. "We assume that the USAID mission has done some of that vetting already, but maybe not on the subject matter issues, and so our experts assess the viability and try and figure out who would be a good match."
After the first visit, the team returns to the U.S. and decides what two cities might work well together. A U.S. city is then contacted and arrangements are made for a visit by local officials to the requesting city. At some point, officials from the city abroad come to the United States and meet with their counterparts in their partnership city. There may be several meetings back and forth to hammer out the details of what will happen, but all in all, Taylor adds, "it's more matching up the problem with someone who knows something about the solution." For example, in March and May 2003, officials from Jabalpur, India, met with their counterparts in Sacramento, California. In October, there will be another meeting in India, where the two sides will finalize the working plan that they've agreed upon concerning traffic management, solid waste management, and citizen participation.
BIGG
Another program that ICMA runs is called Building Institutions for Good Governance, or BIGG, which concentrates on association development. "Of course, ICMA itself is an association of city and county managers, and so as an association, one of the emphases that this organization has is on working with local governments in countries around the world to gain greater influence as governments decentralize," Taylor says.
"Central governments around the world have been hesitant to decentralize from either former Communist regimes or other autocratic regimes," he continues, "because they perceive, and sometimes rightly, that local governments are not really prepared to take on the responsibility of managing some of the service delivery issues that the central governments are doing. So part of what we are interested in doing is creating associations of those local governments. As issues become ripe for decentralization, the local governments are in a technically strong position to be able to influence the central government."
Through BIGG, associations can help create sustainability by ensuring that local governments share knowledge with each other, professionally develop their management financial base by increasing fiscal accountability and transparency, and incorporate citizen involvement into local government decision-making.
Jami Sachs, a program assistant for BIGG, says that the program works on two levels. Each country-specific program is broken down into two projects, one of which is a "task order" or contract through USAID. "The task order deals with budget and finance issues, and it basically provides performance-based budgeting training to local governments," Sachs says. "The other project is a cooperative agreement and that's the local government-supported partnership program, which also has two components to it as well. One is focused on association-capacity building where it works with local government associations in a particular city who provide services to other local governments throughout a country. Those three associations are on the state level, the city level, and the regional level," she adds.
Right now, BIGG is working in Indonesia on a program that began in September 2000, and will most likely extend through June 2004. The cooperative agreement, Sachs says, "pairs up a local government in the United States with a local government in Indonesia, and provides technical assistance to the Indonesian local government through exchanges back and forth between the U.S. city and the Indonesian city."
A typical partnership is about 18 months, and each collaboration chooses a topic. "Some of the topics we've worked on are tourism, planning, new-town planning, new-town development, environmental issues-it really sort of crosses the gamut on a number of different scenarios," Sachs says.
LOGIN
A third component program that ICMA sponsors internationally is called LOGIN-Local Government Information Network , which has been run largely in Eastern Europe since the mid-1990s. Dennis Taylor says that the program began in Hungary, but branched out to most of Eastern Europe as a means of electronically sharing the benefits of what was going on in each individual country so that the countries of the former Soviet Union could capitalize on each other's successes.
LOGIN has also been used in the Caribbean and Latin America. In Bolivia, for example, "It's mostly been an upgrading of the computer infrastructure, electronic capability," Taylor says. "There's an Internet portal that we're working to develop to connect nine associations of local governments in Bolivia, along with a women's council association that's also connected as a part of this particular project, and then the overall federation of Bolivian local governments, which is kind of an umbrella organization for the association of local governments." The purpose of the project is to create an Internet connection that then would allow such things as e-procurement, which develops standardized procurement forms and other processes for local government.
Bringing Local Governments Together
During ICMA's early years, local American government was often comprised of non-professionals who came together to build and maintain a community's infrastructure using their often-limited abilities and job experience. But in today's world, those same leaders must have a management savvy in order to build strong communities. Many of today's city managers hold university degrees in such subjects as public administration, political science and business. Often, they complement education with practical knowledge. And they do not concentrate on fine-tuning a community's needs, but rather look at a broader picture.
This overall aspect of looking at the community as a whole is why ICMA's programs are so popular. This is especially true in other countries, where a decentralized national government often places greater responsibility on local municipalities. These local governments must provide services to their citizens, while establishing governing structures that are transparent and accountable. "There's strength in numbers," says Taylor, "and if you're one local government operating out there with maybe 2,000 of your neighbors, but you don't know each other well, you have a difficult time negotiating these kinds of issues with the central government."
That is where the partnerships of City Links, BIGG and LOGIN come in. By creating partnerships through city-to-city pairing and local government associations, ICMA brings together American professionals who can pass on key management techniques, practices and concepts to their international counterparts.
"Much of what we're doing is decentralization," Taylor says, "so inevitably, the issue of decentralizing power of authority has to be shared in some kind of fashion. Is that going to be at the regional level? Is it going to be inter-governmentally between cities and counties in the same region? How are we going to do that? The short answer is yes, intergovernmental relations is a major issue when you're devolving authority."
Deborah M.S. Brown, a text editor for Issues of Democracy, interviewed Dennis Taylor and Jami Sachs for this article.