Foundation of a New Kind of Governance?

The year is 2040. California’s population is 60 million. To paraphrase Lincoln Steffens, we can see the future, but how will it work? With that many people, how will California manage land, transportation and quality of life?

The answer, increasingly, is through foundations, which represent an emergent mode of governance in the Golden State. Many people applaud this development. Others, a much smaller group, consider it a questionable shift of sovereignty that might further accelerate the privatization of public life.

In envisioning 60 million Californians, the issue of land use will be paramount. Where will these people live and in what densities? And what about open space, which the majority of us accept as necessary for a flourishing society?

The voters of California have been more than willing to ask -- and try to answer -- this question. Over the last five years, they have passed five ballot initiatives setting aside $10 billion for land conservation. This is an impressive record. But can we expect voters to continue to shoulder the major burden of preserving open space at a time when tax-supported state government can no longer do everything for everybody?

In November, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation announced the successful completion of the Conserving California Landscapes Initiative, a program that has acquired or set aside for conservation 342,000 acres of pristine California landscapes, roughly the size of Sequoia National Park, since 1998. The Packard Foundation contributed $175 million to leverage more than $700 million in matching funds from the public and private sectors.

Never before in California history has a nongovernmental agency acted with such sweeping and bold effect on public value, policy and action. True, the foundation, created in 1964 by computer mogul David Packard and Lucille Salter Packard, was authorized by government. But it is not government. It is foundation-based philanthropy, and, in time, it may come to rival tax-supported government as a mode of governance.

The Packard Foundation was not the first foundation to enter the struggle to preserve open space. The Nature Conservancy, the Big Sur Land Trust and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust have been working to conserve land for some time, along with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a hybrid public-private agency. Their achievements are remarkable. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust has preserved about 33,000 acres of farmland in west Marin County: an idyllic landscape of grasslands and rolling hills, dairy farms and grazing cows, oak trees and farmyard fences that would have otherwise been gobbled up by developers. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has acquired and preserved more than 30,000 acres. Farther north in Carmel, Clint Eastwood and his former wife and continuing business partner, Maggie Eastwood, have presented a stunning 130-acre property at the mouth of the Carmel River to the Big Sur Land Trust.

It would be incorrect to understate the continuing importance of government, especially local government, in conservation efforts. In early 1996, for example, the Orange County Board of Supervisors created a 38,000-acre reserve stretching from the coast at Laguna Beach to the base of Saddleback Mountain, from Costa Mesa in the north to San Juan Capistrano in the south. Frequently stereotyped as a bastion of negative conservatism, Orange County, in creating its nature reserve, acted with a flair and surety that made it, all things considered, the most conservation-minded county in the state, as far as demonstrated action was concerned.

On the other hand, the Nature Reserve of Orange County was not a purely governmental piece of business. The Irvine Co., which practically invented suburbanized Orange County, contributed 21,000 acres. County and state parks, together with other private entities, contributed the rest. Thus a foundation-oriented mind-set, symbolized by the participation of the Irvine Co., played a significant role in driving the deal.

Here, then, is a possible paradigm for the future: an increasing entry of foundations into public life, hence, a de facto transfer of governance -- and an implied transfer of sovereignty -- to a new sector. In the years to come, as governmental resources remain scarce and foundation assistance grows increasingly necessary, Californians might be expected to regard foundations as established governance structures.

The McConnell Foundation, for example, has, in effect, endowed Shasta and Siskiyou counties, and has now extended its largesse to the adjacent counties of Lassen and Modoc. Thanks to this flourishing foundation, these counties enjoy educational, recreational, cultural and even public works initiatives far beyond the means of taxpayers in these sparsely settled regions.

A few years ago, the James Irvine Foundation embarked upon a Central California initiative designed to help that region come up with a program to manage expected growth of 10 million to 15 million people over the next two decades. This is public action at its highest and best level. It is also, as the example of Fresno shows, necesssary. Over several decades, Fresno experienced rapid and uncontrolled growth, ballooning from a small farm community to a virtually ungovernable 100-square-mile metropolis. The growth placed serious stresses on cultural, social and governmental institutions.. It’s quite possible that without the Irvine Foundation, the counties of Central California, like Fresno before them, would not have the means -- financial, intellectual, psychological -- to deal with the population growth they inevitably face.

Enter the critics, and there are a few. Could it be, they ask, that so much significant public business will be done by foundations that government will recede in importance? And because foundations are governed by elite oligarchies, would the latter, in effect, exercise the determining influence in government?

We can expect this debate to gain clarity and force in the decade to come as state and local governments struggle to deliver basic services. California as a society can be expected, increasingly, to turn to foundations to ask such questions as: What should we be doing to ensure quality of life in our rapidly growing state -- and how should we be doing it?