The city of Phoenix recently paid $14,000 to renew its membership in the Local Government Research Collaborative, which unites research, innovation and solutions to help solve local government problems.
The program formed in 2013 through a partnership between the Alliance for Innovation, the International City/County Management Association and the Center for Urban Innovation at Arizona State University to help bridge the gap between academic research and local governments.
“Practitioners do not read journal articles,” said David Swindell, a member of the Alliance for Innovation’s board of directors and director of the Center for Urban Innovation. “We pat each other on the back but they don’t impact policy.”
Alliance for Innovation President Karen Thoreson said the collaborative provides the crucial go-between to help these two worlds work together and builds a working relationship that will help both in the future.
“Ultimately we build relationships that benefit both over time,” Thoreson said.
Local governments self-fund the research and discuss what problems they need solutions for. The program helps members decide research questions, as well as submit a request for proposal (RFP) and recommend a researcher to complete the project. Twenty-one jurisdictions joined the pilot in 2013, including the city of Phoenix.
“We think it’s valuable to collaborate with other jurisdictions and for us to compare data,” Assistant City Manager Milton Dohoney said. “It’s difficult to gauge how well you’re doing or the need to do something different if you’re in a bubble by yourself.”
Swindell said the city is focused on finding real solutions to real problems, which makes them a natural fit for the program.
“They (the city) understand the value of looking at problems that need research that no one’s doing that can be useful, not only to Phoenix, but for other communities like Phoenix across the country,” Swindell said. “Their contribution to this effort is in helping, not just financial, which is kind of small, but the contribution of helping us identify what are these issues that practitioners need solved.”
During the pilot program the collaborative funded three projects. One looked at solutions for local governments to have more efficient activity between government, human relations and personnel management. The second researched how communities can prepare for a changing workforce as more young people enter the job market and the third analyzed what lessons local governments in the United States can learn from international examples, specifically one in England and Australia, in regard to community participation.
The collaborative is now working on disseminating this research so that local governments can act on it and use it to their benefit. Swindell enlisted public administration graduate students at ASU to work on this issue so that they will be able to turn academic research into action plans when they are the ones managing local governments.
“One of the tasks that I have them doing this semester is this translation exercise, where they take a piece of published research in an academic journal and boil it down into a 1300-word short magazine article,” Swindell said. “That’s our target audience to actually get these published initially in some of the practitioner magazines that are published by these professional organizations, because that’s what they read.”
The program is also working on transitioning into the next phase, where Swindell said they plan to research home rule and how local governments can operate under state legislatures that are becoming increasingly hostile to them.
Another difference will be ASU’s role in the program. Swindell said during the pilot ASU was a manager so the university could not do research, but now that has changed.
“It was an incredibly time laborious project, because we couldn’t do research,” Swindell said. “I pulled us out of that role so we are still a part of the alliance, but we can do research.”
Moving forward the collaborative has eight members, including the city of Phoenix. Dohoney said he expects the program to continue to improve, because the collaborative is still in its beginning stages.
“The greatest success for the collaborative is still in front of us,” Dohoney said. “Overall we’re still in the infancy with this.”
Contact the reporter at Stephanie.M.Morse@asu.edu.
