Slapping Accountability in the Face: Observance of Accountability in Malawi's Local Governments in the Absence of Councilors

Against the background of Malawi having had no councilors since the second quarter of 2005, this article aims at establishing the effects of the absence of councilors on the promotion of accountability as a tenet of good governance as espoused in the National Decentralization Policy. Adopting a mixed research design with a strong bias towards qualitative research methodologies, the article finds out that in the absence of councilors, observance of accountability by local governments has been negatively affected. The article argues that in the absence of councilors there has been reversal of accountabilities whereby horizontal accountability has been given more emphasis than vertical accountability; having a secretariat that is both a decision-maker and implementer of decisions has been a recipe for abuse of power; and interim mechanisms and emerging institutions responsible for advocating accountability are limited and a mockery of good governance.     

Public Participation and Public Service Modernization: Learning from New Labor?

The public participation agenda is a significant element of public service reform in Europe and beyond. This article examines how citizen participation in local public services was conce ived and enacted under successive New Labor governments in the UK during the period 1997–2010. It is suggested that the emphasis on public participation was central to the ethos of New Labor. This accounts for the persistence of the participation agenda even in the face of scant empirical evidence that specific engagement and empowerment initiatives were successful. Significantly, there was no single New Labor participation narrative. There were instead several distinct strands, drawing variously from the Party's received traditions of State welfarism, corporatist central-local relations, municipal socialism, Blairite managerialism, and, lastly, mutual cooperativism. The article assesses the legacy of New Labor and public participation in the UK before drawing wider conclusions relating to international experience.     

City Management in the United States and Norway: A Comparative Analysis of Professional Orientations

This analysis examines the effects of political culture on the nature and practice of professional local government management by comparing the structures, responsibilities, and relationships of city administrative executives in the democratic countries of the United States and Norway. The findings suggest that, despite fundamental differences in societal institutions and settings, American and Norwegian city managers serve similar roles in their respective local government organizations. However, the notable variations in the processes of municipal management identified between the two nations appear to reflect the contextual influence of divergent political foundations on the operational environment of professional public administrators.     

The Correlates of Local Government Responsiveness Under Decentralization: Do Performance Ratings Matter in the Philippines?

To improve local service delivery under decentralization, performance ratings are often introduced. In this article, performance ratings and other correlates of the citizens’ assessment of the responsiveness of their local governments are investigated with a regression analysis of survey data collected during the pilot test of a performance rating scheme in 12 Philippine cities and municipalities in 2001–2003. The local governments in the eight sites where the ratings were announced are assessed less responsive by their own constituents than those in the four control areas by theirs. Possibly, the citizens exposed to the ratings expected better performances from their officials.     

全面建成小康社会与政府功能透视

全面建成小康社会离不开政府引导、保护、协调等功能的有效发挥,而引导功能无疑是首要之需,作为两大主体的中央政府、地方政府,既具有相向的表达、又具有紧密的关联。中央政府的引导功能主要通过规范授权、财政控制、政策工具、指标考核等方式实现,地方政府的引导功能作用主要通过实际设计、规划布局、理性选择等方式实现。准确把握两者之间的内在统一性、不可替代性,进一步优化宏观层面的整合设计,加强中观层面的统筹推进,有助于从根本上保证全面建成小康社会的质量和水平。     

地方政府有效引导网络舆论思考

网络舆论的日益发展和兴起给地方政府带来了新的挑战和考验,网络舆论引导成为地方政府面临的新课题。尽管地方政府非常重视网络舆论引导,但在重视程度和引导效果方面依然存在差距,普遍存在网络舆论引导效果不彰的问题。因此,不断增强地方政府网络舆论引导性的有效性是各级地方政府亟待解决的问题。     

Formation of procedural beliefs about legal arenas: Do people generalize from loosely related past legal experiences?

Few studies have addressed how people develop beliefs about legal authorities' neutrality and fairness. Using a cross-sectional survey of taxpayers (N = 147), this study examines the sources and processes underlying the formation of these beliefs. Controlling for significant contributions of media stories about audits and past audit experiences, past loosely related negative legal events (traffic court) also shape perceptions that tax auditors are more biased and unfair. Information about police officers exchanged in conversations also creates perceptions that tax auditors are more biased. These generalization effects occur only when people do not have prior direct experience with tax auditors. For taxpayers with prior audit experience, positive experiences are related to more positive perceptions of auditors and media stories about tax audits produce more negative perceptions. The findings suggest that positive and negative past experiences shape beliefs only when they disconfirm prior perceptions based on imagination or indirect sources. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Cultural Policies and Local Planning Strategies: What Is the Role of Culture in Local Sustainable Development?

The authors draw a strategic framework for cultural planning at the local level. The concepts of industrial district and cluster have strengthened the role of space—in terms of external economies of localization and agglomeration—in economic development. The recent debate concerning contemporary development processes has underlined the increasing role of the cultural dimension for local development and has focused on different paths of clustering around cultural investment. The authors review the latest literature on cultural districts and illustrate some key cases around the postindustrialized world in which culture played a critical role by acting as a catalyst for major economic and social renewal. The authors present a strategic model of a progressive cultural district based on an asset-action matrix that intersects cultural policy drivers with capital resources. The authors define a new model of cultural district—the system-wide cultural district—as an emergent, self-organized model of cultural supply that displays significant strategic complementaries with other production chains with a typical, postindustrial characterization.     

Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.     

Local actors and international regionalism: The case of the Sea of Japan zone

The Sea of Japan Zone (SJZ) is an area that has been shaped essentially by transnational relations between the localities of western Japan, northeastern China and the Russian Far East. The emergence of this new type of space, based on interlocal cooperation, is a significant aspect of what could be called the ‘new’ regionalism, i.e. the polymorphous and multicen‐tred movement that is affecting international relations today as opposed to its more rigid version of the late 1950s. The shape of the new regionalism reflects the transformation of international relations in general: this particular regionalization process, that gave shape to the SJZ, is linked to the transnationalization of local actors. The idea of creating the SJZ, in the late 1960s, was first an external answer (interlocal cooperation) to an internal problem (uneven development in Japan). It became a reality some twenty years later as Russian and Chinese localism eventually converged with Japanese localism. Despite important domestic differences the need for local actors around the Sea of Japan to look outside for better development conditions made the synergy possible. It produced a new regional entity that needs to be defined and, for that purpose, that could be compared to other transnational zones in East Asia or even in Europe. Their common characteristic appears to be a functional approach to regional cooperation.