Private Government Formation in the DC Metropolitan Area

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Abstract
This paper examines a variety of quasi‐governmental organizations, mandatory homeowners' associations, special service districts, and transportation management associations, recently established in the urban region. Using the Washington, DC metropolitan area as a case study, this paper explores reasons for their development and implications of them for urban governance. It is argued that these organizations marry the concepts of public special districts and public‐private partnerships in a process of private government formation. Private governments, it is suggested, are not wholly a private response to the shedding of services by the public sector, the dominant notion of privatization and local state restructuring, but the result of demands emerging in the private sector stimulated by social and spatial change. This signals the need to add to the concept of public‐driven privatization the process of private initiated change where the resulting goods and services are more fully shaped by the needs of private interests. The evidence suggests these institutions do not represent a scaling back of the local state as privatization implies, but an extension of state structures in a fundamentally new direction, an extension which could be labeled the parallel state.

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