Managing Intergovernmental Conflict: The Case of Human Services

Tension between the federal government's responsibility to hold grant recipients accountable to national goals and priorities, and state and local government's drive to meet self-determined needs and priorities is a basic characteristic of U.S. intergovernmental relations. This tension exists even when the federal role is perceived to be diminished as in an era of expanded block grants. Such tension, a factor of the mutual dependence in the system, produces an unavoidable conflict in the process and structure of a variety of federallymandated, and stateor locally-administered activities. A key premise of this paper is that such conflict is inevitable; it neither can nor should be avoided; it, therefore, must be actively managed. Attention needs to be directed to conflict and conflict management at this time primarily because it appears that conflict is highly misunderstood by both practitioners and students of public management, and, as a result, systematic attention to conflict management is lacking. This is not to say that such attention is nonexistent. In fact, recent works by Ingram,' Rosenthal,2 Neiman and Lovell,3 and Peterson4 have focused on intergovernmental conflict and bargaining. Thus, while this is not an entirely new topic, the primary focus of this article is designed to tie together concepts of intergovernmental management and conflict management in a new way. Additionally, the subject is of interest because recent actual and proposed changes in federal and state roles and responsibilities have produced significant conflicts which must be managed. Throughout this paper, intergovernmental conflict management will be presented as a 'mind set' which requires new modes of thinking and acting. A conflict management perspective for human services planning will be presented and it will be argued that the implementation of such a perspective is likely to lead to significantly improved intergovernmental interactions and more realistic plans and planning processes. The human services policy area was selected to illustrate the basic tension in the intergovernmental system for three prime reasons. First, human service policy management is inherently intergovernmental, and inherently conflictual. Second, the magnitude and scope of the human service policy arena both in terms of budgets and range of programs make it highly significant. Third, each of the