With the increasing decentralization of government, states and localities must deliver services that were once the responsibility of federal government. Decentralization has necessitated a higher degree of intergovernmental coordination. Authors Santa Falcone and Zhiyong Lan (1997) explore some of the coping strategies governmental agencies use to enhance coordination in the article "Intergovernmental Relations and Productivity."
The authors have written a timely article. With the decentralization of control in government, states and cities are being challenged to fulfill new roles. The federal government trend, in its fiscal relations with the states, is to provide block grants for various programs such as Medicaid, welfare, and employment and training. Though the states have been empowered to take charge of these areas, the federal government continues to exert control over the states in these matters. Cities, too, have been empowered with a greater voice in how these block grant funds are dispersed. Decentralization is beneficial because it reduces paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles, but it also creates new challenges for intergovernmental coordination.
Nowhere is the need for intergovernmental productivity more apparent than with the federal government's welfare reform bill. The bill places aid to people with welfare status in the hands of local government. Reform also involves, among other things, a cutback of federal funding for immigrants: "The cities hardest hit by the bill, then, would be those with large populations of legal immigrants that state law mandates must be transferred to local public assistance rolls" (Barias, 1996, p. 12). The vagueness and inconsistency of some provisions of the welfare reform bill have many cities worried. Prudent public administrators have already started to improve their intergovernmental coordination efforts in anticipation of the change and uncertainty.
The trend towa...