Theoretical Foundations for Organizing the Metropolitan Governance System

Abstract

The concentration of population and productive forces in Russia is significant: 58 % of the country's population lives in 124 major agglomerations. Moreover, 20 largest agglomerations produce 40 % of the country's gross domestic product. However, excessive concentration of resources can lead to “growth diseases” meaning that negative externalities can reduce the concentration's positive effect. Federal, regional, municipal levels of government need to regulate the agglomerative processes for lowering these negative effects. The basic instrument of regulation is the metropolitan governance system. It offers an opportunity to bring an agglomeration as a control object to a necessary state using a set of control mechanisms. Based on content analysis, we performed the author's multilevel decomposition of the metropolitan governance system, which differs from other studies by a greater depth of analysis. As a result, we presented the metropolitan governance system in the form of three subsystems: the control subsystem (“who controls?”), the controlled subsystem (“controls what?”), the subsystem of forward and backward linkages (“controls how?”). Each of these subsystems consists of 16 constituent elements. The elements of the control subsystem are the government bodies' composition and structure; methods for forming the government bodies; the status of agglomeration, its government body and participants; authority's territorial fragmentation. The controlled subsystem includes branches as control objects; responsibilities within the branches (planning, coordination, service provision); territory as a control object; methods for forming the agglomeration's territorial boundaries; methods of distributing the government bodies' functions. The elements of the subsystem of forward and backward linkages are the agglomeration's budget, transfers, taxes; the state (including regulatory and legal) regulation of the agglomeration's development; inter-municipal cooperation; mechanisms of coordinating and expressing the participants' interests; property of agglomeration authorities. For assessing each element, we proposed 46 formalized characteristics and their alternative values. Additionally, we tested four main metropolitan governance models (voluntary, one-tier, two-tier municipal, regional).