How CA FWD and the California Stewardship Network are shaping the future of regional governance in California
Regions matter — and California needs a better system to support them.
For nearly 20 years, California Forward (CA FWD) and the California Stewardship Network (CSN) have championed regional priorities across the state and in Sacramento. Today, as the state faces new economic, climate, and equity challenges, it’s time to go further: to build a durable system for regional implementation, funding, and collaboration.
Why regions?
California’s size and diversity mean its regions have distinct histories, economies, resources, and needs.
Most day-to-day issues are felt regionally. Job opportunities, commute patterns, climate impacts—these look markedly different from the Inland Empire to the Redwood Coast, the San Joaquin Valley to the Central Coast, Los Angeles to the Bay Area.
Despite their differences, California’s regions are deeply interconnected through critical infrastructure, supply chains, labor markets, and resource flows.
The Reckoning: Why We’re Here Now
Since 2021, the state has made significant investments in regional planning. Under Governor Newsom’s Regions Rise Together framework, the state committed over $1.2 billion to programs like California Jobs First and the Regional Early Action Planning Grants (REAP 2.0). California Jobs First and REAP 2.0 have resulted in important benefits. The programs share a similar philosophy—that California is governed best when regions forge consensus around shared priorities and determine on their own how to achieve state goals.
But these programs face some key reckonings that challenge their durability and progress:
1. Sunsetting Programs: California Jobs First is currently scheduled to end in 2026. Each of the state’s 13 regions has produced a strategic plan, and each has access to some implementation funds through 2026. But without state-level changes, this innovative approach to bottom-up, inclusive economic planning could disappear before it creates lasting institutional change.
2. Reevaluation of Regional Planning Laws: Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) have called for a “holistic revisiting” of SB 375, the state’s landmark regional planning law requiring land use and transportation plans to meet climate goals. The program creates significant work for regional planners, while outcomes have not met targets—emissions from transportation are rising, housing production remains insufficient, and transit agencies face fiscal cliffs.
3. Climate Resilience Challenges: California’s regions face increasing climate risks, yet climate resilience is not sufficiently incorporated into existing regional economic and land use planning frameworks, leaving California vulnerable to doing climate risk and resilience policy through disaster response, not proactive planning. Climate collaboratives exist in some regions but not others, and connections with MPOs or California Jobs First are often weak or nonexistent.
4. Federal Restructuring: The federal government’s reduction in place-based investments, including clean energy and climate resilience, has put more pressure on both the state and regions to try and fill funding gaps—making coordination of programs and investments even more important.
5. Administrative Changes: The upcoming gubernatorial election, as well as significant new leadership in the legislature, could put regional structures at risk unless they are institutionalized.
Moving from Vision to Implementation
This moment of reckoning presents an opportunity for the state to build something more enduring. California has invested significantly to create regional visions and strategic plans. Thousands of stakeholders have helped create, vet, and champion regional plans and related strategies across every corner of the state.
It’s time to move from vision-setting to durable implementation. Doing so will require addressing these important implementation challenges:
1. Fragmented Tools: Regional governments and programs do not always have sufficient tools—including land use authority, revenue-raising ability, and governance systems—to build needed regional infrastructure and to achieve their goals.
2. Siloed Plans: California Jobs First strategic plans, MPO/COG Sustainable Communities Strategies, K-16 Workforce Collaboratives, and related workforce development plans are all deeply interconnected in goals. But they are generally produced separately and lack durable operational tools such as joint funding or cohesive structures to fully align. There is limited to no ongoing state investment in directly supporting proprieties in the plans.
3. Data Systems: Regional planning processes and programs tend to gather new data from scratch, rather than pulling from a central repository for regional economic, demographic, and planning information (as exists in most other states).
Launching a ‘Regions-Up’ Work Group
To address these challenges, CA FWD and the CSN have launched a Regions-Up Workgroup, made up of regional civic leaders: conveners from California Jobs First, directors of CSN partners, CalCOG (the state umbrella group of the councils of government), as well as independent experts.
Over the next year, this group will examine California’s history of regional planning, what’s working and what’s not in the state’s current programs, and regional economic development models from other states. Over the next few months, the group will lay the foundation for an actionable policy agenda through a set of thought pieces:
1. The Opportunity: Why this is the time for a new approach to regional economic development in California
2. How We Got Here: The history of regions-up policy and planning in California
3. Learning from Others: How other states manage regional economic development
4. Building a More Durable Regions-Up System in California: Policy recommendations for the next governor
Starting at the California Economic Summit in Stockton (October 21-23, 2025), the group will take these draft recommendations to a broad range of Californians to garner input from across California’s diverse regions. Through the Summit and a set of direct regional engagements, CA FWD and our partners will work to build a state-wide coalition that will become the backbone advocates and evangelists for a new, broadly shared regions-up economic model.
