May 2002

How can organizations create the mandate and the means - the will and the way - to improve the well being of children? One of the things organizations need to do to accomplish this is to accept the fact that it is indeed politics that they are engaged in, says Xavier de Souza Briggs of Harvard University. Briggs presented his paper The Will and the Way: Local Partnerships, Political Strategy, and the Well-Being of America's Children and Youth at the Urban Seminar Series sponsored by Harvard in collaboration with the Urban Health Initiative.

"The standard advice to change agents and advocates is to appeal to enlightened self-interest and to sell results and efficiency," says Briggs. "It appears in some instances as though politics - that arena in which we deliberate important purposes and values and make difficult decisions that derive from the same - has been trimmed from the picture altogether."

This "catch flies with honey" notion is flawed because it sidesteps the fact that achieving better outcomes with kids involves costs and trade-offs, requiring that political differences be negotiated. It also sidesteps the fact that political decisions are driven by short-term calculus of many different (perhaps competing) agendas, and that change, no matter how seemingly rational, is often resisted.

In his paper, Briggs elaborates on the elements of an effort to build political will, summarized as follows:

• Building movement by building constituencies that pressure for change: The strategic work includes identifying, building mobilizing and sustaining constituencies; clarifying commitments to pressure for change; developing leadership and infrastructure.
  
  
• Focusing attention to influence agenda-setting: Strategic work includes framing and communicating issues effectively for public attention; matching messages to target sub-audiences; using focusing events and linking to larger trends; developing a narrative that matches important problems with viable solutions.
  
  
• Advancing the desired agenda: Strategic work includes building and breaking coalitions to authorize specific decisions and secure tangible supports (funding, time, networks, expertise); navigating distinctively local political arrangements, including relationships, repeat encounters, and linked bargains.

Urban-suburban coalitions

How can cities and suburbs work together to solve social problems? How can they do so despite longstanding political animosities between cities and suburbs, bitter racial divisions, entrenched administrative practices and the narrow and short-term perspective that dominates the thinking of politicians and civic organizations?

In her Urban Seminar paper, Metropolitan Coalition-Building Strategies, Margaret Weir of the University of California, Berkeley discusses ways to overcome these obstacles and create effective city-suburban coalitions.

Weir provides case studies of several urban-suburban collaborations and suggests four elements of durable metropolitan collaboration:

• Relationship building: It is the first and central task of coalition building. Repeated interactions are needed to build trust among groups active in different issue areas. Also, successful collaborations involve members with "weak ties", less obvious and distant interests. Such "weak ties" can provide resources, knowledge or political support at crucial moments
  
  
• Defining common interests: Weir provides a variety of ways to approach defining common interests. One way is the strategic framing of issues, which can redefine an issue so that groups who did not see their interests as intertwined find new bases of cooperation. For example, the movement for "smart growth with equity" is a redefinition that seeks to unite low-income communities with environmentalists, business and labor.
  
  
• Information and expertise: Data can help cast issues in a new light, either documenting the extent of a problem or highlighting common interests that may not be apparent on the surface. Data can also show that some solutions are more feasible than previously thought and can highlight patterns of public spending in a useful fashion. Because of the difficulty in gathering, producing and analyzing data, intermediary organizations that specialize in analyzing data are often critical components of regional coalitions.
  
  
• Multi-level political action: Metropolitan collaborations can be effective at all levels of government, including the federal level. Also, because there are few regional organizations with significant decision making power, most key regional decisions get made at the state level. Due to entrenched localism and partisan divisions, the state is a tough arena for promoting city-suburb coalitions. So statewide campaigns supported by many groups, often united by a thin agreement rather than a deep common interest, may be the best strategy at the state level.