Institute of Urban and Regional Development

Since 1995, the James Irvine Foundation has invested more than $11 million to support the growth and development of Collaborative Regional Initiatives (CRIs) throughout the state—nonprofit organizations that engage key players from business, environmental, and a variety of other advocacy groups with players from local governments and public agencies to create improvements in their regions. CRIs work on issues ranging across transportation, land use, housing, and economic development. They work in a variety of ways from developing legislation to media campaigns to practical work on particular projects. All are directed at building civic capacity and filling in gaps where government does not or cannot act. Some CRIs have been in place for years; others are more recently formed. They represent experiments in regional governance. Recently, the Irvine Foundation tapped a team of Berkeley faculty to perform an assessment of the CRIs so the foundation can target its resources in order to make them effective and sustainable over time and assist them in producing valuable outcomes for their regions. City planning professor Judith Innes, who led the complex evaluation, teamed with city planning professors AnnaLee Saxenian, Karen Christensen, Karen Chapple and political science professor Judith Gruber to focus on the projects and programs that a sample of CRIs engage in, asking which are most successful and why. In particular, the researchers examined how variables like leadership, resources, diversity of participation, processes of dialogue and collaboration, and the ways problems have been framed contribute to the degree of success in each program. The work is designed to assist the CRIs with strategies to select and build the successes of their programs and to help them overcome obstacles and identify opportunities for effective work. Together the researchers published case studies of four major CRIs -- the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, the San Diego Dialogue and the Sierra Business Council -- as well as an analysis of regional workforce development collaboratives in California.

The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities was formed to change the patterns and practices of land use in the San Francisco Bay Area to achieve a more compact, transit-friendly form of growth. The diverse group has worked toward this goal by creating a regional Compact or vision outlining the actions needed for a sustainable Bay Area, a Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint used to influence the regional population projections, and a regional indicators report. The group’s one action project has been to bring investment into disadvantaged neighborhoods through their Community Capital Investment Initiative. The idea is that disadvantaged neighborhoods offer an untapped business opportunity if investors and developers can be assisted by knowledgeable community players; at the same time, such investments can be designed to provide community benefit. However, business’s need for speed and secrecy in making investments and the community’s need for transparency and thorough dialogue have created conflict. Both business and community players are learning to work together and are committed to making the effort productive and sustainable, but it remains a work in progress. Overall the Alliance’s main outcomes, in addition to some building projects, have been to advance a regional discourse about smart growth and to help regional civic leaders representing the three E’s (environment, economy and equity) to understand how each other’s interests can be jointly met. According to Professor Innes, the primary reason the Bay Area Alliance has not achieved more lies in its choice of a large scale and complex problem—changing the region’s institutions and land use patterns and ultimately making it sustainable. "This is what planners call a ‘wicked’ problem—where parameters are poorly defined, features are contradictory and changing, there are many players with differing goals and there exists no simple generic solution," she says. "The scope and complexity of BAASC’s mission makes achieving their ambitions difficult."