Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: Lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies

Recent years have seen a “wave” of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly-selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics, but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy institutions is underexplored. This article constructs a framework for understanding their integrative design characteristics, drawing on recent work on “robust governance.” The framework is used to explore the connection of six national-level climate assemblies with political institutions, public debate, and civil society. Our findings highlight significant variety in the integrative design of these climate assemblies. This variety challenges the view of assemblies as a standardized object with predictable effects on legitimacy and governance capacity, while also refining deliberative systems theory's highly abstracted conceptions of integration and impact.     

Decentralisation,Governance and the Structure of Local Political Institutions: Lessons for Reform?

Many governments are devolving power to elected local councils, hoping to improve service delivery and citizen representation by bringing officials closer to the people. While these decentralisation reforms hold the promise of improved governance, they also present national and sub-national leaders with a complex array of options about how to structure newly empowered local political institutions. This article draws on cross-national experience and the latest research to identify the trade-offs inherent in structuring local political institutions. The study's specific interest is in the impact of strong, locally elected councils on governance and representation. Proceeding from an empirical basis that competitive elections are vital for the legitimacy and efficiency of local political institutions, the analysis first questions the impact of four institutional features – central versus local control, local executive versus local council authority, local council structure, and the role of parties – on service provision and fiscal solvency. The article's second section analyses the impact of decentralisation on political representation, with a particular focus on the role of institutional design in combating the threat of extremist parties. A final section summarises empirical findings and advances some policy-relevant conclusions.     

From Innovation to Convention: Legitimate Citizen Participation in Local Governance

In governance structure legitimacy is required not only of the governing system, local authorities or public organisations but also of other participants, including citizens. The legitimacy cannot be judged either by traditions of representative democracy or by innovative theories of deliberative or participatory democracy. The article analyses scientific publications on citizen participation in local governance. It asks how empirical studies on local sustainable development planning (SDP) and New Public Management (NPM) practices construct legitimate citizen participation. In general, studies on citizen participation have not conceptualised the relations between citizens and power holders as questions of legitimacy. However, the studies approaching citizen participation in the local processes of SDP and NPM include various empirical, theoretical and normative arguments for citizen participation. These arguments recognise, accept and support particular activities, arguments and outcomes of citizen participation, and include and exclude agents and issues. They construct and reflect the definition of legitimacy in the local governance. As constructed by scientific texts, justifications for citizen participation reproduce a discursive structure in which citizen participation becomes marginalised and citizens’ views excluded. The results illustrate that discursive structures of legitimate citizen participation support conventional governing practices and hinder innovative practices in local governance.     

Addressing the legitimacy of the council-manager executive in local government

This article uses the concept of legitimacy to contribute to the debate about leadership change in local government. It focuses on the council-manager form of executive, used in Australia, Ireland, Finland, New Zealand, the US, and was an option for English local authorities in the Local Government Act 2000. After reviewing the central features, underlying values, and variations that the council-manager model displays cross-nationally, the article draws on research carried out in Stoke-on-Trent, England, a city which adopted a variant of the council-manager form. The analysis assesses the model operating there in terms of legitimacy, and argues that some of its shortcomings are addressed by the introduction of a form of decentralised, deliberative, neighbourhood governance.     

Citizen Participation in Local Policy Making: Design and Democracy

Embedding democratic innovations that increase and deepen citizen participation in decision making has become a common policy of local governments in many countries. This article focuses on the role of the design of these innovations and seeks to establish the effects of their design on democracy. The article evaluates 20 cases of participatory governance and 19 deliberative forums. The findings show that different designs produce different democratic effects, but also that the suitability of a particular design depends on the type of policy issue. Tensions between representative and direct democracy are more likely to exist for participatory governance than for deliberative forums.     

Inclusive local governance: normative proposals and political practices

This article specifies the conditions that a democratic expansion process would require in order to be inclusive in the face of complex forms of inequality. The dialogue between the qualitative analysis of an inclusive local governance experience initiated in Ottawa in 2004 and proposals to integrate the egalitarian perspective of critical deliberative theory and intersectionality theories throws up two elements that facilitate inclusive deliberative governance: (1) the incorporation of the intersectional perspective into the design and running of local governance apparatuses and (2) the implementation of enclave deliberation.     

Community engagement in Australian local governments: a closer look and strategic implications

Public input into decision-making through participatory and deliberative democratic practices has become a widely accepted and legislated responsibility of Australian local governments. At any one time, councils are leading submission processes, workshops and online surveys on a multitude of projects, ranging from long-term community strategic plans to public art projects. The increase in these practices has been exponential, leaving little time for critical reflection. The lack of empirical data to illustrate how community engagement is understood and practised in different councils has hindered sector-wide reflection. This paper presents the findings of the ‘Local Government Community Engagement Census’, a survey of 175 councils – approximately half – from 4 of Australia’s eastern states. This sectoral snapshot provides a picture of how councils understand, prioritise and practise community engagement, allowing critical reflection, an interpretation of implications and suggesting areas for future research.     

The limits of proceduralism: Critical remarks on the rise of ‘throughput legitimacy’

‘Throughput legitimacy’ is among the most successful conceptual innovations that scholars of public policy and administration have produced in recent years. I argue that this new understanding of legitimacy needs to be seen in the context of an increasing proceduralism in political science and public administration. Throughput legitimacy attracted so much attention because it is the perfect normative companion to the analytical concept of governance. Governance is procedure, and throughput legitimacy tells us what good procedures are. In my critical discussion of this innovation I examine the analytical value of the concept, as well as its normative and practical implications. I argue that, regarding concept formation, throughput legitimacy may enrich existing typologies of legitimacy but at the same time has a severe problem of fuzzy borders. Politically, throughput legitimacy lends itself to apologetic uses when it is applied as a tailor‐made normative standard for technocratic, non‐majoritarian institutions.     

Competence Trust,Reflexivity and Risk Management in Hong Kong

Abstract

Trust is an essential element of governance. Lack of trust in government engenders doubts regarding its competence, weakens its legitimacy, and creates difficulties in the process of governing. As suggested, declining trust was related to reflexivity. This article, based on a Hong Kong study, confirms that a lack of competence trust in the government's ability to manage work-related risks correlated with reflexivity. Self-identified social status also influences the degree of reflexivity and competence trust. The conventional approach to cultivating trust through managed social participation has been widely practiced, but the results have not led to an increase in competence trust in Hong Kong, even when the policy outcomes are positive. While recognizing that reflexivity and its impacts on trust are inevitable, this article argues that efforts should be made to develop critical trust through meaningful participation in the deliberative process.     

The New Era of Stakeholder Engagement: Gaining,Maintaining, and Repairing Legitimacy in Nonprofit Organizations

The need for nonprofits to foster legitimacy within their communities has led to growing calls for mechanisms of sound governance based on the engagement of stakeholders in organizational activities. Previous studies have investigated the mix of governance mechanisms used by nonprofits to manage legitimacy, without paying attention to the different challenges of legitimacy these organizations face. Aiming to fill this gap, this article employs a multiple case study methodology to explore how mechanisms for engaging stakeholders in governance can be shaped by the need to gain, maintain, or repair legitimacy. The findings show that formal mechanisms based on the direct designation of board members by local stakeholders play a pivotal role in repairing legitimacy. Gaining legitimacy requires actual participation of stakeholders, while maintaining legitimacy calls for formal mechanisms that balance representativeness and competencies of the leadership.     

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: Procedural mechanisms of accountability,transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.     

Governance is where you find it

The concept of governance is used frequently and in a variety of different ways. This article discusses Mark Bevir’s use of an interpretative approach to governance and its implications for understanding better how we govern. This approach has particular relevance to democratic forms of governance, and to the use of deliberative and direct forms of democracy.     

From Tuscany to Victoria: Some Determinants of Sustainability Reporting by Local Councils

This paper seeks to respond to recent calls by the academic community for studies investigating sustainability reporting by the public sector, as well as for more engagement-based studies of this issue by examining the views of managers within local councils (LC). The objective of this project is to provide insights as to the possible reasons and explanations for the types of sustainability disclosures among a group of local councils operating in Italy and Australia. In particular, an international comparison is undertaken to ascertain the effect of culture on the adoption of sustainability reporting (SR). Evidence is collected from semi-structured interviews with managers and accountants from ten local councils consisting of five from Italy (Tuscany) and five from Australia (Victoria). The findings suggest that although there are available some general policy documents relating to sustainability reporting, councils are left to their own discretion as to what they consider fit under the definition of sustainability and therefore, determine to a large extent, what to report to stakeholders. Moreover, there was a range of legitimacy type behaviours displayed by a number of councils while others were influenced by notions of public sector accountability and transparency. Adopting Hofstede's cultural framework, the research also highlights the relevance of the Italian and Australian cultural settings in shaping the SR practices used by LCs. The findings suggest that differences regarding cultural dimensions, such as ‘power distance’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance’, influence key aspects of SR.     

A genealogy of EU discourses and practices of deliberative governance: Beyond states and markets?

The article offers a genealogy of ‘deliberative governance’ in the EU—an important contemporary discourse and practice of ‘throughput legitimacy’ within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s ‘Governance’ reports of the European Commission's in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU's ‘Open Method of Coordination’, which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid‐2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the article argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neoliberal, market‐making status quo.     

The Effects of Media and their Logic on Legitimacy Sources within Local Governance Networks: A Three-Case Comparative Study

Although theoretical and empirical work on the democratic legitimacy of governance networks is growing, little attention has been paid to the impact of mediatisation on democracies. Media have their own logic of news-making led by the media’s rules, aims, production routines and constraints, which affect political decision-making processes. In this article, we specifically study how media and their logic affect three democratic legitimacy sources of political decision-making within governance networks: voice, due deliberation and accountability. We conducted a comparative case study of three local governance networks using a mixed method design, combining extensive qualitative case studies, interviews and a quantitative content analysis of media reports. In all three cases, media logic increased voice possibilities for citizen groups. Furthermore, it broadened the deliberation process, although this did not improve the quality of this process per se, because the media focus on drama and negativity. Finally, media logic often pushed political authorities into a reactive communication style as they had to fight against negative images in the media. Proactive communication about projects, such as public relation (PR) strategies and branding, is difficult in such a media landscape.     

Efficiency and legitimacy in collaborative public management: Mapping inter-local agreements in England using social network analysis

English councils have long aspired to be ‘self-sufficient’, providing services within single jurisdictions with limited inter-local collaboration. However, by 2017 almost all local councils (97 per cent) participated in one or more frontline or back-office ‘shared service’ involving 338 distinct partnerships. We analyse this new-found enthusiasm for inter-council collaboration by performing exploratory social network analysis on organizational and financial data for all 353 English councils. We examine factors predicting collaboration and the characteristics of the service networks that result, focusing on resource, organizational and political considerations. Propensity to collaborate was found to be unpredictable, but partner choice was rational, driven by geographical proximity and similarity in organizational and resource characteristics. We argue that, according to the institutional theory of organizations, both efficiency and legitimacy influenced these reform choices, and the risks of fashionable collaboration were mitigated by careful partner selection. We highlight implications for future quantitative research into symbolic (non-instrumental) forms of collaboration.     

全球治理新试验？议题互嵌、机制关联和公民社会兴起——以贸易议题和气候变化为例

全球化的深入正在改变国际社会结构,同时也影响着全球治理体制的合法性、回应性和有效性。当前,问题领域之间分野日益模糊,不同问题结构之间的交叠区域日益扩大,议题联系方式千丝万缕;其次,作为全球问题应对手段的国际机制和治理框架调整滞后;第三,在国际结构“解构”下,非国家行为体（特别是全球公民社会）登上国际舞台,并在全球治理过程中扮演着多重角色。本文以贸易议题和气候议题的“互嵌”结构作为研究对象,展现两个议题面临的议题交叠、机制关联及行为体互动的图景,以期描画未来可能出现的全球治理新方向。本文最后将针对这种趋势对中国参与全球治理的可能方式提出建言。     

CENTRAL REGULATION OF ENGLISH LOCAL AUTHORITIES: AN EXAMPLE OF META‐GOVERNANCE?

This paper discusses how the UK government has reconfigured its regulation of English local authorities by moving from direct oversight to using an indirect independent agency as a vehicle of meta‐governance. This theme is discussed through two strands: first, by examining how several factors eroded central government’s capacity to directly regulate councils. The second strand examines the strategies used by the Audit Commission, an independent agency, to assert its authority over councils and how its hegemony is sustained by facilitating and participating in horizontal and vertical networks across government, specialist policy and stakeholders’ communities.     

Unveiling patterns of contestation over Better Regulation reforms in the European Union

Regulatory reforms labelled ‘Better Regulation’ are a prominent item on the political agendas of most advanced democracies and the European Union. Governments adopt Better Regulation measures to strengthen their democratic legitimacy and increase their regulatory and economic effectiveness. Notwithstanding their rhetorical appeal, their design and implementation are susceptible to high levels of political contestation. We therefore ask: are there systematic differences in stakeholders’ demands for what Better Regulation should achieve? What explains these differences? We argue that conflict over Better Regulation is rooted in what stakeholders prefer as a regulatory system of governance. Stakeholders demand reforms that lead to one of the following three scenarios: deregulation, technocratic or participatory policy‐making. We examine stakeholders’ demands expressed in the EU. We find that national authorities responsible for coordinating Better Regulation and cross‐sectoral business organizations support deregulatory and technocratic reforms. Business and public interest organizations are equally supportive of strengthening participatory policy‐making.     

Sources of Legitimacy in Metropolitan Governance: A Comparative Case Study of Governance Structures

Legitimacy is a central factor in democratic administrative systems, as it determines the success-or failure-of governance structures. In this article, we search for the sources of legitimacy in metropolitan governance by focusing on governance tiers and mechanisms. Auckland, Dublin, Oslo, and Montreal serve as empirical examples. We highlight the strengths and limitations of different types of metropolitan governance structures, and identify factors that may help to establish long-lasting governance structures. To be legitimate, metropolitan governance must take place at a contextually legitimate administrative level, and the governance mechanisms must be in harmony with a legitimate administrative actor.