Regionalism

Subtopic

Sep 23, 2025

Divided We Drown

Regionalism

Divided We Drown: Exploring Cross-Municipal Cooperation for Climate Resilience in Cape Ann

This initiative has been undertaken in collaboration with the Harvard GSD’s Office for Urbanization, which is a partner in a NOAA-funded research project titled Developing Local Capacity for Managing Extreme Weather Events Across Community Engagement, Governance, Finance, and Infrastructure. In this subset of the project, we have conducted fieldwork and interviews with residents and officials across the four municipalities that comprise Cape Ann. Our aim is to assess the financial, political, and social barriers and enablers to cross-municipal cooperation in the face of increasing climate disasters. This material will lay the groundwork for a series of recommendations about new region-based strategies that can be piloted or activated through horizontal mobilization of key stakeholders across municipalities. Our aim is to provide evidence for how and why working both within and across existing municipal borders will make it easier for residents and authorities in Cape Ann to manage and recover from livability disruptions set in motion by extreme weather events associated with rising sea levels and the increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes. Beyond showing how and why cross-municipal efforts may help to more equitably distribute the benefits and burdens of adapting to or mitigating climate change, we will specifically argue for the importance of cross-municipal cooperation in the infrastructural development and management of water and sewage infrastructure. We not only draw evidence from other successful region-based initiatives already undertaken in other parts of Massachusetts, ranging from those unfolding around the Ipswich River to recent developments in Cape Cod. We systematically assess who in each of the four municipalities would or would not support cooperative efforts around water infrastructure, how and why. Such analysis will build on a deeper understanding of the socio-economic composition, ecological landscape, financial capacities, and local political dynamics within each municipality, using this information to identify barriers or enablers to shared action around water infrastructure. In terms of deliverables, we a) identify particular leaders, organizations, agencies, issues, locations, events, cultural identities, or historical references that might serve as fertile starting points for robust and productive conversations about the importance of regional cooperation and how to get it; and b) offer a proposal for how to jump-start conversations across municipalities, built on a commitment to bringing move voices into the picture, including youth, that allow for frank and deliberative dialogue about what has separated municipalities in the past and how they may work more collaboratively in the future. Our aim here is not to impose or offer top-down policy recommendations about how to act regionally so much as to offer a set of strategies that will help a larger number of Cape Ann residents collectively ponder whether cross-municipal connectedness around water challenges could or should be a high priority and to give them, and to offer some ideas about how to best inspire Cape Ann residents to work together to secure their future through bottom-up commitments and dialogues.