Preserving the Social Contract Through Intergovernmental Collaborations

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Tanya Settles
February 21, 2025

Thomas Hobbes’ bleak prediction that life without government would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is more than a little troubling. Governments have a responsibility to promote stability and safety in communities through the social contract that exists when people consent to governance in exchange for the protection of rights and provision of public goods and services. The problem is that often, resources and time are short, and individual local governments may lack the capacity or will to offer services necessary in a way that meets expectations. Intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) are one mechanism of shared governance to resolve this dilemma and uphold the social contract by ensuring that different governments work together to fulfill the expectations of community members efficiently and effectively. 

While the social contract is philosophical understanding between governments and the governed, a well-structured IGA reinforces the social contract. An IGA is an effective action plan that articulates the responsibilities of each party to the agreement, fair cost sharing and allocation and in some cases, expected performance outcomes. When an IGA is designed well, it has the possibility to strengthen public trust and promote accountability. However, when the IGA is poorly designed, trust can be eroded or the governments that are parties to the agreement run the risk of being perceived as inefficient failures. In worse case scenarios, a lack of good-faith negotiation during the construction of the IGA can, in the end, erode public trust because of a lack of transparency or fairness. Resource sharing is important, but an IGA is about more than fiscal contribution. It is a promise to the people that their governments are working in concert to promote the social contract.

To align with the social contract, IGAs need to consider the nature of the relationships between the parties to the agreement, address fairness among the parties and legal sufficiency. These elements are equally important. A watertight, legally sufficient document is not more valuable or relevant than the relationship and trust between the parties. There’s a time and place for attorneys in the construction of the agreement, but the implementation of the IGA falls on staff across various governments and organizations. Success hinges on their ability to work with each other seamlessly, respectfully and building trust between the staff who are responsible for implementation of the IGA is essential to success. Government attorneys may lean into making legal arguments and advocating for the greatest advantage for the government entity they represent. This is understandable—they are legal advocates, after all, and they aren’t doing their jobs if they don’t represent the legal interests of the government they serve. However, the voice of legal counsel shouldn’t drown the voice of other contributors.

In the sequence of events during the construction of the IGA, when legal advocacy precedes trust-building and collaboration, multiple risks emerge. First, there’s the potential for the “free-rider” problem when one party to the IGA may have incentive to engage in cooperation, but lacks incentive to contribute to success. When one party exhibits dominance in construction of the IGA over the other parties, there’s a possibility that other governments in the collaboration may enter a multi-jurisdiction IGA from a disadvantaged position. Consequently, one party’s bullying strategies and tactics to gain contractual advantage undermines the potential benefits of the IGA for the collective, consequently increasing the risk of violating the social contract. 

To alleviate this problem, parties to the IGA should consider multiple working groups to explore various important aspects of the collaboration. One approach that has promise is the use of multiple working groups consisting of an executive steering group, a group of managers and leaders who focus on strategy, another strategy group of subject matter leaders, and a group of line level experts. Legal counsel is involved when working groups report their needs and preferences for the IGA that may include strategies such as incentivizing cooperation by ambivalent parties. Practical applications of this approach may yield promising results and at the same time avoid problems associated with a single dominant voice or free ridership. 

With strategy and planning for the IGA construction process, local governments gain control over their contributions, expectations and their role in the collaboration in a way that is respectful and transparent. In this way, the social contract survives, even in times where resources are scarce, and governments need to collaborate to fulfill their social contract obligations. An IGA has the potential to operationalize the social contract and move from a tacit, amorphous understanding to an enforceable agreement between governments to do something specific the communities of multiple governments need to be safe and stable. 

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Author:  Tanya Settles is the CEO of Paradigm Public Affairs, LLC. Tanya’s areas of work includes relationship building between local governments and communities, restorative justice, and the impacts of natural and human-caused disasters on at-risk populations.  Tanya can be reached at [email protected].  The opinions in this column and any mistakes are hers alone. 

 

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