Jumpstarting the 'Motor City': The role of values and ideas in policymaking (Michigan)

This study uses the Detroit, Michigan federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities program as an in-depth case study to examine the role that values and ideas play in the process of policymaking. It shows that values and ideas can be important resources for policy entrepreneurs who are advocating for policy change at the local level. Values and ideas are found to be important to policy change in several ways. Values and ideas can be used as strategic resources for getting a policy proposal on the local policy agenda, and for assembling partnerships of social production to help bring the policy idea to fruition. The values basis of policy ideas is also relevant to their success. However, this process of policy change is constrained by the predominant values and ideas within a given political culture, including the patterns and practices of local public and private institutions. Alternatively, the nature of values and ideas means that they can be “captured” by opponents of a policy proposal and used to block the process of policy change.; When values and ideas are overlooked as potential resources for policymaking, our notions of the strategies that can be employed to effect policy change, and the actors most likely to engage in this process are too narrow. For example, community based organizations (CBO's) have typically been assigned a minimal and reactive role in many scholarly accounts of urban development policymaking, largely because they are perceived as lacking the economic and institutional resources considered to be critical to policymaking. This study argues that CBO's can be important and proactive agents for development policy change if they can use values and ideas as a strategic resource in the policy process.; The study was conducted using case study analysis methods, employing interviews, documents, and field observations, to develop a descriptive account of the case with regard to the EZ program process and related development processes in Detroit from 1993–1995. This was followed by the generation of theoretical propositions and themes regarding the relationship between empowerment theory and empowerment program implementation, and generated theory were compared to existing theory found in the urban politics literature. A variety of data sources were utilized, including interviews, federal and Detroit city government documents, documents and publications from the Empowerment Zone program activities, newspaper and magazine articles, and documents from various local institutions (including CBO's).