In practice - Modernising the Council: A Personal Reflection

Joined up governance has emerged as one of the key policy discourses of the modernisation of local government under New Labour. Community strategies are one of the principal policy tools that are intended to deliver more joined up governance at the local level. This paper draws upon early findings from the national formative evaluation of community strategies to consider the extent to which community strategies are delivering more joined up governance in practice. The paper concludes by highlighting a number of tensions in the role of community strategies in delivering a more joined up local agenda.     

Regime transformation from below: Decentralization,local governance,and democratic reform in Nigeria

How realistic are democratic-governance strategies that emphasize local governance as a key component? Using Nigeria’s experience in local government and primary health care in the 1980s and 1990s as a case example, the article finds there were substantial shortfalls in local participation and program performance. These were caused by problems in the local political environment and local institutional design, in the national policy environment (particularly in the funding system), and by the stresses of structural adjustment, resource shortfalls, the natural physical environment, and weak leadership. These combined to create poor and inappropriate reward structures and lack of accountability. However, even though the Nigerian case was not successful, most of the specific problems that hurt it are remediable through policy changes at the national level. Several of these were under consideration at the time of the coups of 1992 and 1993.     

A behavioral view on responsibility attribution in multi-level governance: Upward and downward responsibility attribution in response to performance below aspirations

Multi-level governance systems provide decision-makers with many avenues for external responsibility attribution in response to lacking performance. This study provides a behavioral perspective that examines responsibility attribution to the national government (upward) and policy implementers (downward) as a function of performance relative to decision-makers' aspiration levels. The study proposes that perceived accountability increases the propensity of external responsibility attribution, and that decision-makers' political alignment to actors on other governance levels explains when responsibility is deflected upwards or downwards. Using a survey experiment that presents factual information on youth care overspending to 1086 elected local government officials, the study finds consistent evidence that performance below aspirations increases upward responsibility attribution. Accountability strengthens responsibility attribution for negative performance downward to policy implementers. Finally, responsibility is attributed upward less frequently by decision-makers who are politically aligned with the national government, but information that signals performance below aspirations attenuates this tendency.     

Towards pluralism and partnership in management development in local government

'Joined-up government' has been a policy thrust characterising much of the first term of the Labour government. The last four years have seen a flourish of area-based and local partnership initiatives. Information and IT are seen as crucial to facilitate joined-up government and improved service delivery at both central and local level. Ambitious targets are thus set to make all dealings with government deliverable electronically by 2005. This article examines data sharing in a local partnership, using as an example the preparation of the Children's Service Plan 2000-2003 in the city of Sheffield, setting out the national policy background, with particular reference to children's services plans; introducing the project; discussing the results obtained in the data collection exercise, and concluding that the organisational and cultural change necessary to share information effectively require time, and above all a period of relative stability to mature and take hold.     

Collaborative Governance of Ageing: Challenges for Local Government in Partnering with the Seniors' Sector

This paper considers the role local government plays in the formation and effectiveness of local collaborative partnerships in ageing well. Collaborative processes are central to emerging models of local governance and have received considerable practical and theoretical consideration with respect to many policy domains. Such collaborations require local organisations and actors from various sectors to work together in partnerships and networks to achieve policy goals. This paper reports research from two collaborations in southeast Queensland municipalities, and shows that joint efforts between local government and community organisations pose challenges. These relate to the political context and specifically to the tensions between flexibility and coordination; and tensions between harnessing community resources and investing resources. We highlight the value of a framing role for local government to ensure that such governance models for local action on ageing realise a collaborative advantage. In particular, the findings highlight the need for local government to invest in these processes and build social infrastructure and assets in order to develop improved ways of facilitating collaborative governance.     

HOW POLICY NETWORKS CAN DAMAGE DEMOCRATIC HEALTH: A CASE STUDY IN THE GOVERNMENT OF GOVERNANCE

This article examines a detailed case study of implementation networks in England using the example of the relocation of the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, which became a flagship PFI project for the Labour government after 1997. The case study illustrates the workings of the new order of multi‐layered governance with both local and national networks from different policy areas interacting. However, it also sheds light on the governance debate and illustrates how in the world of new public management, powerful actors, or policy entrepreneurs, with their own agenda, still have the facility, by exercising power and authority, to shape and determine the policy outputs through implementation networks. It is argued that, whereas policy networks are normally portrayed as enriching and promoting pluralist democratic processes, implementation networks in multi‐layered government can also undermine democratic accountability. Four aspects here are pertinent: (1) the degree of central government power; (2) local elite domination; (3) the fragmentation of responsibility; and (4) the dynamics of decision making which facilitates the work of policy entrepreneurs. All these factors illustrate the importance of ‘the government of governance’ in the British state.     

Big Windows and Little Windows: Implementation in the 'Congested State'

This paper argues for the need to re-assess models of policy implementation in the 'congested state'. This re-appraisal focuses on two main directions. The first involves locating implementation in the context of wider models of the policy process. We fuse three models, those of Kingdon, Wolman, and Challis et al ., to form a new 'policy streams' approach. The second examines implementation in multi-level governance. In the UK and elsewhere, much of the focus of traditional implementation studies has been on the link between one central government department and a local agency. However, this vertical (central-local) dimension fails to give sufficient stress to the other horizontal dimensions of 'central-central' and 'local-local'. Paraphrasing Kingdon's terms, implementation models also need to incorporate the 'little windows' at local level as well as the 'big' windows at national level. Using evidence relating to the implementation of UK policy towards health inequalities, this paper argues successful implementation is more likely when the three policy streams are linked across the three dimensions. The model is thought to be applicable to other areas of the public sectors and complex issues facing all governments.     

Local Governance and Local Democracy: The Barcelona Model

Using Barcelona as a case study, this article examines the relationship between local governance and local democracy. It begins with the terms of the debate and continues by identifying the context in which a particular model of governance arose in Barcelona. The article then looks at the extent to which governance fosters democracy, by strengthening the role of civil society organisations in government and creating new spaces of deliberation between the state and the citizenry. The final section examines the limitations of Barcelona's model of local governance in enhancing local democracy. The key finding is that the predominant role of the local council in facilitating citizen participation has as many strengths as it has weaknesses. In short, when participation becomes public policy it becomes a double-edged sword.     

Modernisation,Managerialism and the Culture Wars: Reshaping the Local Welfare State in England

The story of local government over the last few decades is often summarised in the assertion that there has been a move away from institutional authority embodied in the structures of councils towards more complex networks of local governance, incorporating a range of stakeholders and other agencies, alongside a shift of power from local to central government. But local government has been at the centre of wider processes of restructuring - of attempts to modernise the welfare state, and specifically the local welfare state. Underpinning the changes that have faced local government (and created new forms of governance) has been a series of assumptions about welfare and how it is best delivered. These combine notions of community, neighbourhood, personal responsibility, workfare and partnership with a distrust of 'bureaucracy' and professional power. It is in this context that the 'modernisation' agenda - promising cultural change - has been driven forward, paradoxically combining a rhetoric of decentralisation and empowerment with an increasingly direct involvement by the institutions of central government and a range of other state agencies in the practice of 'local' governance. The emergent arrangements are increasingly characterised by forms of self-regulation as well as more differentiated management from above.     

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR REGIONAL ECONOMIC DILEMMAS: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF THINK TANKS IN THE GOVERNANCE OF REGIONAL POLICY

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the role of think tanks in the governance of regional policy. The paper critically reviews a series of reports by United Kingdom (UK) based think tanks, published between 2002 and 2008, a period of interest on the part of national government in the most appropriate configuration of subnational governance. Policy transfer and the role of ideas in regional policy provide the framework for analysis. The interpretation of the findings suggests that the think tanks considered are largely products of national policy debate and party politics in the United Kingdom, despite efforts to devolve power. This is surprising given debates about the influence of European Union regional funding on UK regional policy, seen as a prime example of multi‐level governance.     

Mugabe at war: The political economy of conflict in Zimbabwe

This paper employs a 'political economy of conflict' approach to explore the recent deterioration in the governance of Zimbabwe. It argues that this analytical approach, which has been applied by scholars such as William Reno to highly dysfunctional and/or collapsed states like Liberia and Sierra Leone, is appropriate for understanding the current actions of the Zimbabwean government as well, and especially their relation to the military's unpopular intervention in the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Zimbabwe's current crisis has been aptly described by various scholars as a failure of leadership, this paper argues that such failures of national governments in Africa need to be understood within the broader context of international political economy. Zimbabwe's lapses in governance extend beyond the state and the national border to features that have non-state and informal as well as international and transnational dimensions.     

Stabilization and symbolism: language and regional politics in the Chuvash Republic

The government of the Chuvash Republic, an ethno-federal region of the Russian Federation, used a targeted and symbolic language policy in an attempt to stabilize the position of the republic's titular language while avoiding conflict with local Russophones and the Russian federal government. The resulting policy allowed the republic's government to frame the existence of an autonomous Chuvash republic – as well as the local elite's form of governance – as being essential to the preservation of the Chuvash language and thus the Chuvash people. In this way, it used language politics to strengthen its position vis-à-vis both local constituents and the Russian federal government. However, the limited nature of the government's program has made its gains tenuous in the face of continuing Russian political and cultural recentralization.     

Neighbourhood Governance: Contested Rationales within a Multi-Level Setting – A Study of Manchester

‘Neighbourhood’ is a long standing concept in local governance which was re-energised as part of the post-1997 New Labour policy paradigm. This paper builds on the work of Lowndes and Sullivan which identified four distinct rationales for neighbourhood working – civic, social, political and economic. The utility of the framework is explored through primary research in Manchester, UK. The research shows that different rationales are held by actors at different locations within the complex system of multi-level governance within which neighbourhood policy is made and implemented. Neighbourhood approaches to urban regeneration exist within a congested governance environment. In Manchester, regeneration has been strongly driven by the self-styled ‘Team Manchester’ who have provided an urban entrepreneurial vision for change in the city. Significantly, however, interventions at the neighbourhood level have shown potential for creating opportunities for citizen and community dissent and empowerment not subsumed with the narrative of the entrepreneurial city. Lowndes and Sullivan's framework provides important analytical building blocks and illuminating tools for understanding neighbourhood approaches. This research points to the merit of a dynamic approach recognising competing perspectives and contested agendas.     

REGIONAL GOVERNANCE IN ENGLAND: A CHANGING ROLE FOR THE GOVERNMENT’S REGIONAL OFFICES?

Debates about the appropriate territorial scales of government to meet the challenges of economic, political and social change have gained momentum in Western Europe in recent years. In the UK, political mobilization has transformed constitutional arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By contrast, in the English regions, a less radical approach has been adopted, but the outcome has been a strengthening of the institutions of regional governance. A key feature has been the enhanced responsibilities of the Government Offices for the Regions, which have been encouraged to build on their traditional administrative functions and adopt a more strategic role. This article explores the Offices’ contribution to regional and local governance. Our central argument is that although increasingly expected to act as a bridgehead between national and sub‐national government and a focus for regional policy coordination, their potential role in filling the missing gap in English regional governance has not yet been fully grasped.     

Disaster Governance in the Philippines: Issues,Lessons Learned,and Future Directions in the Post-Yolanda Super Typhoon Aftermath

The article analyzes the importance of disaster governance as an emerging paradigm in the context of the post-Yolanda Super Typhoon devastation in the Philippines. The article offers various lessons which may be heeded in times of disaster in which various stakeholders of governance are involved with. Consequently, the article posits future challenges and directions hurled in the conduct of disaster governance in the Philippines in terms of policies and programs. Finally, the article enunciates that both the national government and local government must play an active role in disaster governance through policy-making and policy implementation changes in both theory and praxis.     

Experiencing Multi-Level Meta-Governance

This article analyses the outcome of dividing the meta-governor role among various levels of governance and describes local actors' experiences under multiple meta-governors. The empirical case presented here involves Danish local action groups in contemporary EU Rural Development and Fisheries programmes. This article takes its theoretical point of departure from the four types of meta-governance that Sørensen identified. The data analysed are derived from a survey sent to all Danish local action group board members and coordinators. The article demonstrates that authorities at the sub-national level in the context of multi-level meta-governance engage in various types of activities and identifies important differences between board members' and coordinators' perceptions of meta-governance.     

The Linkage between Security,Governance and Development: the European Union in Africa

The international community currently favours an approach to development that stresses a triangular linkage between security, good governance and economic development. This approach clearly informs the European Union's agenda in Africa, which has progressively integrated governance and security elements. This paper will show that this agenda is at least as much determined by the bureaucratic and national affiliations of the concerned EU actors as it is by African realities and international trends. African security indeed triggers a competition between the different European institutions, eager to be the driving force for a policy that can offer some additional resources and autonomy. The consistency and the credibility of the EU security policy in Africa will therefore depend on the responses provided to these institutional rivalries.     

Understanding Multilevel Governance Processes through Complexity Theory: An Empirical Case Study of the Quebec Health-Care System

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of multilevel governance processes. We do so by focusing on the in-depth examination of the institutional changes recently implemented in the Quebec health care delivery system that require a close collaboration between interdependent actors acting at various levels of governance. Our three research questions are: (1) How does multi-level governance emerge in a pluralist institutuional context? (2) How do multi-level governance processes shape the adaptive capacity of the organization to its environment? (3) How does institutional context influence these multi-governance processes?Our empirical investigation is inspired by the theory of complexity which invites us to pay attention to three processes: self-organization, eco-self organization and co-evolution. This study shows that the effectiveness of multi-level governance processes do not only go through the implementation of instruments aiming at aligning the action of lower government levels with the objectives of the upper levels as suggested by numerous existing works. More precisely, it suggests that more distributed and coordinated processes favor a more homogenous form of adaptation (Miller and Page, 2007) taking into account the interdependence between stakeholders.     

The health care state in the information age

The computerization of the medical record has important implications for the governance of health care, and the importance of health care means that changes wrought there are indicative of changes in government as a whole. This paper draws on work in public policy, medical sociology and studies of science and technology, as well as on cross–national empirical research in Britain and France. It describes the recent development of information policy in health care as an exercise in state–building, realized specifically in the governance of the health professions. The paper concludes with a discussion of what is both new and not so new in the form and extent of state power which emerges.     

Is Renewable Energy Planning Blowing in the Wind?

This paper presents the results of a survey of English and Welsh local authority planning departments which asked planning officers their views with respect to planning and renewable energy. National government dictates national policies. Local authority planners, however, feel uncoordinated and lacking when making decisions about such developments. Often battered by sophisticated assaults unleashed within the adversarial planning system arena, planning professionals are often left without the ability to compose counter-arguments with which to promote environmentally less damaging proposals in line with 'the greater good'. This has led to the rise of NIMBYism, lack of innovation and is a barrier to successful national renewable energy policy aims.