State-reinforced co-provision of community-governed greenspace in racially marginalized neighborhoods: lessons from Chicago’s innovative NeighborSpace Land Trust and Partnership

Racially marginalized neighborhoods lack public goods, such as greenspace, because of civic disenfranchisement and failed provisioning by local governments. The governance systems and adaptive and/or transformative capacities needed to overcome these dilemmas are poorly understood. We used the State-Reinforced Self-Governance (SRSG) Framework to examine an innovative solution to the greenspace problem. In 1996, Chicago’s Mayor, Park District, and Forest Preserve District created NeighborSpace—a successful trans-governmental non-profit land trust organization and cooperative partnership. The NeighborSpace partnership ensures equitable and efficient greenspace access and management via self-governing arrangements and community-based governance. To understand the design features that enable this solution, we examined the federal, state, and local policies that created the NeighborSpace partnership and grant its formal powers. We also interviewed key stakeholders governing the NeighborSpace partnership. NeighborSpace’s status as a formally recognized trans-governmental non-profit land trust generates considerable benefits for co-provision and co-production. These benefits stem from many design features, most notably NeighborSpace’s: (a) authority to make constitutional and administrative decisions via self-governance, (b) capacity to coordinate diverse stakeholders via Ostrom’s design principles for multi-actor cooperation, and (c) operational capacities to efficiently acquire, protect, and transfer land for community-based governance. This solution exemplifies principles of adaptive and transformative governance via SRSG, providing critical theoretical and practical lessons about the mechanisms that enable successful co-provision and co-production.