The Kingdom of Thailand practices governance with some unusual twists, some of which offer intriguing models for regional governance in America.

During my recent visit, Thailand was struggling with massive flooding. I monitored the interactions among national, provincial and local governments during the disaster. And I spent time with flood refugees in Pattaya, a city renown for sun and sex south of Bangkok.

Thailand is unique among its neighbors as having never been a European colony. It was ruled by an absolute monarchy until the 1930s and still has a strong royal presence in a constitutional monarchy. The national government structure has a prime minister, National Assembly with a House and Senate, and a complex judiciary — in all a blend of western laws and cultural practices that go back to the Khmer roots of the kingdom.

The Thai people have suffered through 16 constitutions, usually triggered by governance crises or military coups. Most of the constitutions make only small changes in the basic government structure. But each redistributes political and economic clout among the traditional powers — old families, the military, and the royal family — often with little consideration of citizen desires. Interestingly, the current king has played a role in resolving some governance crises, facilitating peaceful leadership changes between political parties and avoiding the threat of military coups, and yet more constitutions.

As one of the “Asian tigers”, Thailand enjoyed rapid growth through the second half of the last century. However, it suffered its own crisis of overdevelopment in the 1990s. As a result, some economic enterprises owned by the traditional powers were purchased or displaced by international firms, whose logos are now ubiquitous across the nation. Newer roads have been built to connect rural farmlands to urban centers.

Bangkok is the largest city in the kingdom; the region is home to over 12 million, almost 20 percent of the national population. It is served by numerous expressways, underground and elevated transit lines, and considerable boat traffic on the Chao Phraya River that flows through the center of the city.

The Chao Phraya River also channels monsoon waters from the northern rice fields, through the city, to the Gulf of Thailand. When flooding occurs, it can shut down factories for weeks and relocate families for months. Yet the positive, hospitable spirit that drives the Thai people prevails. Loy Kratong — which, ironically, is the festival of the spirit of the waters — was still celebrated with all-night revelry, in the midst of the flooding.

The metropolis of greater Bangkok, one of 76 provinces countrywide, is governed by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), a creature of the national government. It has an elected chief executive, the governor of Bangkok, and an elected 57 member Bangkok Metropolitan Council. It is authorized to prepare regional plans and deliver road, transit, waste management, housing, security, and environmental services. But it often shares these and other authorities with the national and local governments.

These sharing arrangements were severely strained by the flooding, resulting in running conflicts between the national government’s flood control organization, the Flood Relief Operations Center (FROC), and the BMA. The prime minister and governor of Bangkok, two of only three directly elected executives in Thailand, carried on a daily war of words and threatened actions in the press. To add to the volatility, neighborhood districts (of which there are 50 in the Bangkok region) were often felt left out of decisions to control flooding, and periodically engaged in guerilla activities, such as illegally opening flood gates.

What can we learn about regional governance from Thailand? The national government has empowered regional governance in the Bangkok region, through the BMA, and at times provided funding, to plan and implement major transportation and other regional projects. As a result of the current flooding, the BMA is also a key player in designing and providing the improved flood control systems required to protect Bangkok against future flooding. While its actions might not match the boldness or rapid implementation of Chinese provinces, many of the infrastructure projects are impressive. And protecting the region against future flooding would be monumental.

Even though public comment and criticism of government appears to be a national pastime, public involvement in decision-making still appears to be dominated by the traditional powers. However, major public demonstrations influenced the drafting of the most recent constitution, resulting in provisions supporting public participation. In addition, the governors of Bangkok and the Bangkok Metropolitan Council are directly-elected. Only time will tell if actions like these will foster greater civic engagement at regional and other levels of governance.

The intriguing “wild card” is the role of the King in resolving governance crises. This is partially related to the respect that the people have for the current King, the threat of royal family intervention does influence the behavior of political parties. For better or worse, that threat has probably faded, due to the advancing age of the current King and mixed reviews of the crown Prince. Lacking a king, could regions in the states empower individuals or groups of individuals to help bring warring local factions together to take bold regional actions? Maybe a committee composed of regional senior statespeople. When I lived in the Pittsburgh region, for example, Fred Rogers and various Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins could play that role.

These are only impressions of a short-term traveler overseas (and a battered regionalist at home) — but hopefully food for thought as we think about regional potentials in America.

Bill Dodge is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Regional Councils, author of Regional Excellence, and is writing a new book on regional charters. He can be reached at WilliamRDodge@aol.com.

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Local governments have strengthened their capacities multifold during my professional life. I recall vividly working with some that once keep financial records by hand, depended on snail mail for communications, and only responded to their neighbors under court order. Conversely, I have seen local governments earn the respect, and accompanying tax dollars, to provide state-of-the-art roads and sewers, public safety and recreation programs, and even bus service and affordable housing.

Yet in spite of this increased competency, individual local governments have been losing the ability to address many of their toughest challenges — the ones that cut across jurisdictional boundaries — at an increasing pace since the turn of the century. If there has ever been a time for innovation in local government, it is now.

Crosscutting challenges are not new. Some were predetermined by our natural environment. For example, local governments realized that taking drinking water out upstream and dumping waste water downstream only worked for the jurisdiction at the headwaters. Everyone else was going to drink someone else’s pollution. The same was discovered when the jurisdictions drawing on a common aquifer exceeded its ability to replenish itself and had to keep digging deeper wells. Neighboring local governments realized that they needed to negotiate watershed plans to assure adequate and potable drinking water. Ditto for airshed plans to breathe clean air.

Similarly, the natural environment often shapes the path of physical development, requiring roads and rails, water and sewer lines to follow benign topography. Again, local governments have to come together to negotiate compacts to shape future regional growth and pull in the reigns of escalating infrastructure costs.

Yet while local governments are learning to respond cooperatively to some tough environmental challenges, they still act as if they can divide up one of its most important living organisms — human settlements.

Human settlements are just as much part of the natural environment as deer or mice. They have vital organs — downtown business and cultural districts, suburban employment centers and shopping malls, residential neighborhoods and recreational areas — all tied together by the sinews of transportation, the arteries of commerce, and the protoplasm of community.

Yet over the last century, human settlements have been divided up by dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of local governments, especially the more urban ones.

Now enter the era of limited resources. Local governments have hit financial ceilings, limiting their responses, to any tough challenge. They have reached the limit of their capacity to sustain their services, maintain their facilities, and finance employee health care and retirement.

Even if individual local governments want to continue to be independent of their neighbors, they can no longer deny the need to work cooperatively to address their toughest challenges.

All is not hopeless. Local governments have come together in ad hoc and ongoing ways to address their cross-cutting challenges. They have formed councils of governments and special districts to address transportation, air and water quality, and sometimes affordable housing and natural resource preservation. They have supported regional funding for transit, sports stadia, arts, cultural, and library facilities. They have developed regional agendas to pursue state and federal government funds. They have developed common plans to safeguard their citizens in natural and terrorist disasters.

Yet all of that has usually been on a piecemeal basis. Local governments have been reluctant to invest in creating sufficient ongoing capacity to take advantage of crosscutting opportunities and brunt common threats. Witness, for example, the response to the American Recovery and Revitalization Act. Some regions had already invested in cooperative plans and programs for transportation, emergency preparedness, weatherization, or broadband communications, and were prepared to take advantage of the largest infusion of federal funds in this and probably many decades to come. Yet many others had to play catch up and will probably not be as successful in securing adequate funds to address common challenges.

Bottom Line: The future of human settlements depends on local governments being able to work together. Region-by-region, local governments need to design and build a “regional charter” that empowers then to work together, as effectively as their individual charters empower them to work independently. Only a few regions have wrestled with this task, usually under the mandate of state governments, such as the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Portland (Oregon) and San Diego regions — and even the agreements there do not encompass their entire human settlements.

A regional charter worth its salt would require redrawing the boundaries of many regional councils of governments, recasting them as regional charter councils with adequate staff and resources to address the tough challenges. Regional charter councils would also have access to predictable funding streams for implementing critical actions, including the ability to submit funding options to the public in regional referenda. They would engage regional stakeholders, from all sectors and the general public, but be controlled, or heavily influenced, by local governments. Most importantly, they would be held accountable by the public, such as through annual reports on their activities and periodic citizen reviews of their charters.

Regional charters would transform local governments. Elected officials would have to learn to negotiate carefully with their neighbors. Staffs skilled in network management, administering collaboratively what it cannot do alone, would be required.

Most importantly, regional charters will require the public to become practicing regional citizens.

Of course, many of those challenges will require state and federal government support — and, at times, some gentle or not so gentle prodding. However, if local governments are coming together regionally, as opposed to engaging in interjurisdictional food fights, it should increase their influence, and clout, at higher levels of government.

How can we start building regional capacity? Gather existing regional citizens to design a vision and strategy for building a regional charter, probably incrementally. Build on activities that already demonstrate some of the characteristics of regional charters, such as Metropolitan Planning Organizations for planning and distributing transportation funds. Plan sewer and transit facilities jointly. Establish a regional organization, possibly called the Regional CitizenShip, to educate the public on how to practice being a regional citizen. Test the regional charter by negotiating a compact to shape future regional growth. And challenge both the state and federal governments to provide priority funding for regional initiatives.

Regional charters can provide the capacity to negotiate sustainable, affordable, regional growth compacts and provide the confidence to address the toughest regional challenges. And maybe, most importantly, they might help our grandchildren be proud of their local governments!

Bill Dodge is looking for a few good local governments that are interested in designing regional charters to strengthen their capacity to address tough common challenges. He is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Regional Councils, author of Regional Excellence, is writing a new book on regional charters, and can be reached at WilliamRDodge@aol.com.

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The bane of our polarized politics is nowhere more evident than in attempts to create effective partnerships among central cities (often politically blue), surrounding suburbs (variations of purple), and fringe rural areas (often red). Even when the logic of seizing common economic opportunities or thwarting common environmental threats is compelling, it’s difficult at best to reach agreements on how to deliver cost-effective services in such fields as roads, transit, sewer, water–indeed almost any critical service area. And when it comes to addressing such social challenges as fiscal inequities between rich and poor jurisdictions, the task borders on the impossible.

And that’s just in more urban regions. Pursuing partnerships between more urban regions (often blue) and more rural regions (often red) is usually deemed politically suicidal.

As President Obama strives to build bridges across the red-blue divide of our politics and society, a key pillar of that strategy needs to be regional cooperation.

A decade ago, I became the executive director of the National Association of Regional Councils (NARC) and inherited a large-small–but mostly urban-rural–divide. My members were the regional councils of governments that guide transportation, air and water quality and land use planning, and deliver common services at the multi-jurisdictional level. Some of the approximately 500 regional councils across the country are predominately urban or rural, but many have a clear urban-rural mix.

NARC sponsored activities to bring the two factions together. But with little success. In fact, many of the smaller, more rural regional councils had already left NARC and joined the National Association of Development Organizations.

Yet, what NARC could not achieve internally has begun to take shape in regions across the country, as they respond to the challenges of the new century.

So what’s happening? More urban regions are becoming interested in preserving their rural fringes, to slow profligate sprawl growth and promote infill development that utilizes existing infrastructure and services.

Simultaneously, more rural regions have begun to encounter the same economic, environmental, and social challenges as the more urban ones–absorbing new immigrants from other regions and overseas, for example. Local leaders and citizens in both sets of regions realized that they cannot address their own challenges, especially tough ones like affordable housing, if they can’t engage all parts of their regions–red, blue, and purple–in resolving them.

What’s more, problems call out for joint approaches when they spill over the historic borders. This is especially evident in urban regions that are exploding into the greenfields of neighboring rural regions. But it is also evident in the growing realization that the real economic marketplace often cuts across neighboring rural and urban regions, making cooperation mandatory to compete successfully in the global economy.

More rural regions are now providing agricultural and other goods to neighboring urban regions and more urban regions are providing emergency preparedness and other services to neighboring rural regions. Soon, urban and rural regions could be jointly preserving the fields and forests that are critical to consuming the CO2 emissions that threaten the future livability of all regions.

President Obama has appointed Adolfo Carrion to direct a White House Office of Urban Policy, along with Derek Douglas as his special assistant on urban affairs. The mission is to bring unity to intergovernmental issues that, historically, have been addressed haphazardly throughout the “silos” of the federal bureaucracy. It’s an important initiative, but one that could easily cause the political “scar tissue” within and between urban and rural regions to itch, if not fester.

Is it possible to give this office a regional character? The toughest challenges require regional approaches. Moreover, by dealing with challenges at the regional level, red and blue interests can be brought together, either in individual, home regions or across neighboring regions that face common challenges. Regional approaches can also reduce the interjurisdictional friction that has undermined all too many well-intentioned efforts to address tough challenges. Regional approaches cajole central cities and counties, surrounding suburbs, and rural fringes to come together and develop common strategies that both address their crosscutting issues and tap their collective resources.

And regional cooperation can also engender meaningful state government participation–especially when the strategies require working across state boundaries. I recently facilitated a Wingspread Conference attended by regional councils stretching along Southern Lake Michigan. The only way they can address cross-cutting challenges, such as moving goods and people across their boundaries, is to have the collective support of at least four states for common strategies.

President Obama is committed to trying new approaches to bridge the destructive polarization that has divided the country. An Office of Regional Policy might begin to send such a healing message to a hopeful electorate. A lead role might, in fact, be taken by a reinvigorated Department of Housing and Regional Development, especially well equipped to breathe life into these policies through the appointment of a seasoned regionalist, Ron Sims, King County Chief Executive, as its Undersecretary.

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In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner bemoaned the closing of the western frontier. Until then, unfettered expansion onto free land had been the nation’s development dream, even though it required forcibly dislocating its Native Americans. By the 1890s Census, however, the unrelenting flow of humanity, along with setting aside Native American reservations, had brought settlement to points across the untamed wilderness of the West. The closing of the western frontier undermined America’s hopes for the future.

This year, 2008, may mark the closing of another frontier–the greenfields frontier. For over a half century, the nation has experienced unfettered expansion of human settlements, urban and rural, onto low cost greenfields.

A piece of earth and a car to drive has been central to the current development dream, resulting in explosive low density sprawl. New communities sprung up so quickly, and randomly, that they overwhelmed city annexation, even if it had been desired. But it wasn’t. Part of the dream was to flee the problems of the cities and set up new, more perfect, communities.

Instead, the new communities grew independently, often with little knowledge of their neighbors’ actions. Typically just in times of crises would they came together to deliver common services, such as sewer and water.

Yet as they morphed into interdependent regions, a handful made compacts to shape their future development more cooperatively. The Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis-St. Paul regions have planning and service districts that are responsible for preparing and overseeing the implementation of regional compacts to shape growth. Others, such as the Denver region, have negotiated voluntary growth boundaries, along with principles for guiding future development. These regional compacts have resulted in more cost-effective public services, but not impenetrable barriers to development by those who can finance their own roads and other services.

Volatile fuel costs are already threatening the greenfields frontier. Decades of unrestrained growth have slowed dramatically in recent months. Developments on the edges of regions are not selling, and the foreclosure rates on sold houses are at historic highs. The trickle of humanity that was already selling its McMansions on the fringe and moving into townhouses close to public transit could become a flood. Regions are imploding and the prospects for returning to boundless expansion are as likely as finding a cheap replacement for gasoline.

Again, while the closing of the greenfields frontier will cause a national sense of loss, the shift will bring positives. Infill development might even be a godsend. Uncontrolled sprawl was already resulting in expensive, duplicative services and infrastructure. Infill growth should result in fewer roads and more walk-to-services, reducing taxpayer costs.

And if future growth is based more on downtowns and close-in neighborhoods rather than geographic expansion, then communities across the country will be more motivated to negotiate cooperative compacts to shape their development, indeed negotiating the “deal of all deals” to assure a high quality coexistence between existing and new residents.

Global warming could close the greenfields frontier decisively. In his new book Six Degrees, Mark Lynas describes the alarming impact of raising the earth’s temperature by six degrees Celsius, one degree at a time. By the time CO2 emissions raise the temperature by 2 to 3 degrees–which will potentially happen in the lifetimes of our children if CO2 emissions are not reduced–the combination of melted snow pack, high winds, widespread drought, coastline flooding, and violent storms will already be redistributing humanity to less-impacted areas. By the time CO2 emissions raise the temperature by 4 to 5 degrees–which could potentially occur in the lifetimes of our grandchildren–irreversible changes, such as the burning of rain forests and the eruption of methane hydrates in warmer oceans, will be driving what’s left of humanity to the highest mountains, the plains of Canada and Russia, and even the former polar ice caps.

The impact of global warming will be more dramatic than $4 a gallon gas. Just preserving productive greenfields, such as forests that consume CO2 emissions, or farmland that can tolerate higher temperatures, might require making them off limits to future development.

The closing of the greenfields frontier could open the door for a challenging new one. Instead of being dependent on boundless land expansion like earlier frontiers, this frontier could focus on making already developed regions more energy self-sufficient. It could foster creative adaptation to climate change, greater economic equity, and expanded resource renewal to assure a more secure future for our children and grandchildren. The once-in-a-lifetime investments in new infrastructure proposed in federal and state economic stimulus programs offer a timely opportunity to explore the possibilities of this new frontier.

Opening the renewable frontier is a daunting challenge, but perhaps, as well, our best hope for the survival of humanity.

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