Institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas arise from the division or partitioning of authority in which decisions by one government in one or more specific functional area impacts other governments and/or other functions. The focus on externalities of choice in fragmented systems integrates multiple research traditions into a conceptual system to understand and investigate collective dilemmas ubiquitous in contemporary governance arrangements. The mechanisms for mitigatingICAdilemmas are classified according to their scope and enforcement. Incentives to participate in a mechanism are hypothesized to favor mechanisms that provide the greatest gain for the least cost under different conditions of collaboration risk as determined by the nature of the underlyingICAproblem, the compositions of affected jurisdictions, and institutional contexts. After reviewing empirical applications of the framework, an agenda to advance the theoretical and empirical development of theICAapproach is advanced.

This article describes the institutional collective action (ICA) framework and its application to the study of governance arrangements in metropolitan areas by focusing on the tools of regional governance for solving ICA problems. Regional governance mechanisms are classified by their focus on either collective or network relationships. The role of these within these mechanisms is analyzed and the transaction costs barriers to the emergence of regional governance institutions are identified. The concluding discussion identifies the limitations of self-organizing mechanisms and develops a research agenda to investigate the emergence, evolution, and performance of regional governance institutions.