Who Gets to ‘Build Back Better’? How Local Coalitions Secure Federal Resources

• In Event: Building Cities through Crises: Resilience, Resources, and Infrastructure

Abstract

How do local coalitional and institutional factors affect the ability of metropolitan regions to successfully secure potentially transformative investments from higher levels of government? Recent federal initiatives in areas including infrastructure, the semiconductor industry, and energy decarbonization have initiated a wave of regional industrial policy programs and, consequently, a frenzy of new, but uneven investment in new production facilities, infrastructure, research and development, and workforce training. While an active body of research has begun to substantiate the potential long-term impacts of these investments on the economic trajectories at both the national and subnational levels (see e.g. Juhász et al. 2023), the political economy of how regions secure these investments in the current US context, including coordination that takes place both within and between levels of government, is not yet well-understood.

This study aims to begin to fill this gap by comparing similar economic regions that reached different stages of competition in federal support for local clusters in the electric vehicles / energy storage and biotechnology / health sectors. Drawing from similar federal programs (the Build Back Better Regional Challenge and Regional Innovation Hubs) which each attracted hundreds of applicants, we pursue in-depth comparisons of matched pairs of non-awardees and awardees in the two sectors (n=12). We examine the proposals’ substantive policy content along two primary dimensions: first, the economic, in terms of local investment contributions and their sources, types of economic interventions proposed, and the kinds of economic specialization to be sought with federal investment. The second dimension is the social/environmental, in terms of meeting program criteria for inclusive, sustainable program design. We then consider the features of the coalitions authoring both awarded and non-awarded proposals in terms of the institutional partners that are present in the proposal, their designated project roles, and the career backgrounds (e.g. previous institutional and project experience) of top leadership in the key organizing institutions. Special attention is also given to the presence or absence of state-level actors and their stated roles in the proposed projects.

These analyses help us to understand how different local institutional relations impact local capacity to attract the attention and support of higher-level government institutions for potentially transformative investments. Furthermore, we consider whether and how these differences in local institutional relations correlate to differences in the career backgrounds and prior experience of actors in key institutional positions.

Author

• Seth Pipkin, University of California, Irvine