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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Local government > General
Community visioning and strategic planning programs have become increasingly important in recent years as local governments in rural areas have searched for innovative ways to revitalize their local economies or manage population growth. A panel of experts describes local government programs in ten states. They also evaluate the effectiveness in reaching the vision and objective set forth in these programs. The authors examine the main components of each program and offer insights into factors contributing to its success. Major attention is paid to the need for social capital, benchmarking, and continuing support following the initial efforts. The discussion in the book includes recommendations for starting a community strategic visioning exercise.
How far can government be reinvented? What is the impact of globalization on the delivery of government services around the world? This comparative book debates new managerial and policy paradigms, with a sophisticated analysis of the potential effects of the marketizing of government services. Case studies explore The US Government's National Performance Review, the relocation of Britain's Inland Revenue IT services with a US multi-national, the impact of the Europeanization of government in the EU, the implausibility of reinventing government, and the applicability of new theories of analysis.
Local government innovation has become one of the most important topics on China's policy agenda in recent decades. This book explains why some local governments are more innovative than others. This book uses a novel theoretical framework and points out that in China's multi-level government structure, the administrative hierarchy and the span of control could shape local governments' innovation motivation, innovation capability, and innovation opportunity, thus influencing local government innovativeness. The author systematically analysed the 177 winners and finalists of the biennial Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG) Awards Programme from 2001 to 2015 to provide convincing empirical evidence to support this theory. This book adopts an institutional approach to explaining local government innovativeness in China and may be a useful reference to help us learn more about local government decisions and behaviours.
This volume covers a wide spectrum of governance issues relating to small states in a global context. While different definitions of governance are given in the chapters, most authors associate governance with the setting and implementation of policies aimed at managing a country or territory, and with the related institutional structures and interventions by political actors. Generally, good governance is associated with concepts such as policy effectiveness, accountability, transparency, control of corruption, encouragement of citizens' voice and gender equality-factors which are, in turn, linked with democracy. What emerges from the book is that the societies of small states are being re-shaped by various forces outside their control, including the globalization process and climate change, rendering their governance ever more complex. These problems are not solely faced by small states, but small country size tends to lead to a higher degree of exposure to external factors. The chapters are grouped into four sections broadly covering political, environmental, social and economic governance. Governance is influenced by many, often intertwined, factors; the division of the book into four parts therefore does not detract from the fact that governance is multifaceted, and such division was based on the primary focus of each particular study and its main disciplinary background. The expert authors have, moreover, used a variety of approaches in the studies, the subject of small states being well suited to scholarly work from different disciplines using qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches to arrive at useful conclusions.
How do states respond to minority nations' demands? Are state nationalism and majority nationalism the same? This book brings together the leading lights in nationalism studies to turn their attention to the neglected role of the state in nationalist disputes. The aspirations of state and majority nationalists often conflict with the aspirations of substate nationalist movements, leading to disputes over resources, symbolic recognition, and the structure of the state. State elites are then forced to supply arguments defending the political union and to articulate strategies for its continuation. In the process, they make explicit what being 'national' means and the symbolic repertoires for doing so. With case studies from China, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Nepal, this edited volume examines state and majority nationalism in all its guises, asking how states respond to nationalist challenges from below. It is particularly timely at a moment when territorial and secessionist crises are reshaping politics. State and Majority Nationalism in Plurinational States will be relevant reading for students and researchers of comparative politics and international relations, including those with a deep interest in territorial politics, national identities, group rights, and representation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
This book answers the question why London has been a stronghold for the Labour Party for relatively long periods of the last century and continues to be so to this day to an extent that surprises contemporaries. The book draws on evidence from history and political sociology as well as the personal experience of the author in London local government during the 1980s. It argues that while changes in the London economy, plus the ability of the party to forge cross-class alliances, can go some way to explain the success of the Labour Party in London, a range of other demographic and social factors need to be taken into account, especially after the year 2000. These include the size of London's growing black and ethnic minority communities; higher concentrations of well-educated younger people with socially liberal values; the increasing support of the middle-classes; the impact of austerity after 2008; and the degree of poverty in London compared to non-metropolitan areas. This book will be of key interest to readers interested in the history of the Labour Party, the politics of London, Socialist politics/history, British politics/history, government, political sociology, and urban studies.
Serves as a practical guide to city administrators on how to keep municipalities fiscally healthy and, if fiscal hardships occur, how to cope with them. Provides theoretical frameworks around fiscal emergency situation and bankruptcy in local government, as well as offers an assessment of the indicators and ratios of fiscal stress at local level. Explores recommendations that can be used to address situations of fiscal stress. Serves as a desk reference for practitioners, especially now that the topic of fiscal emergency situation and bankruptcy is again taking center stage during Covid-19 crisis.
Serves as a practical guide to city administrators on how to keep municipalities fiscally healthy and, if fiscal hardships occur, how to cope with them. Provides theoretical frameworks around fiscal emergency situation and bankruptcy in local government, as well as offers an assessment of the indicators and ratios of fiscal stress at local level. Explores recommendations that can be used to address situations of fiscal stress. Serves as a desk reference for practitioners, especially now that the topic of fiscal emergency situation and bankruptcy is again taking center stage during Covid-19 crisis.
This book looks at experience in government restructuring and devolution from a variety of national and international perspectives, both within the European Union and elsewhere, focusing on lessons learned and ways forward.Since the 1980s, there has been a global trend to give more power to local governments. Even in Korea and the United Kingdom, the most centralised countries in the OECD, local government powers have increased, with substantial economic benefits. Within the European Union, the principle of subsidiarity has enshrined the idea of devolution. New member states, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have significantly created new and self-sufficient local and regional governments. However, this process has been complicated. Devolution is not a panacea in its own right, and need not lead to economic growth. While it can encourage savings through collaboration, it can also lead to confused lines of authority and can complicate policy formation and implantation. Devolution can strain local budgets, forcing local governments to rely on their own sources of finance, rather than central government transfers. Suburbanisation, rural depopulation, the growth of some regions, and the decline of others have raised new problems, particularly related to inter-governmental cooperation among local governments and different levels of government. In many cases, an increased number of governments has increased administrative costs.
This book analyzes Latin American regional integration with a novel conceptual approach grounded in extensive field research. Using the UNASUR (Union de Naciones Suramericanas) as a case study, the author investigates the process of policy-making in regional public policy fields in South America. The project focuses on intergovernmental structures of regional organizations as an institutional framework for a variety of independent processes in regions. It also challenges the perspective of democratic states as unitary actors and seeks to analyze the factors which favor or obstruct regional processes in different policy-fields. This work will appeal to researchers, graduate students and anyone interested in Latin American politics and policy-making.
This book offers a new approach for the future of democracy by advocating to give citizens the power to deliberate and to decide how to govern themselves. Innovatively building on and integrating components of representative, deliberative and participatory theories of democracy with empirical findings, the book provides practices and procedures that support communities of all sizes to develop their own visions of democracy. It revitalizes and reinfuses the 'democratic spirit' going back to the roots of democracy as an endeavor by, with and for the people, and should inspire us in our search for the democracy we want to live in. This book is of key interest to scholars and students in democracy, democratic innovations, deliberation, civic education and governance and further for policy-makers, civil society groups and activists. It encourages us to reshape democracy based on citizens' perspectives, aspirations and preferences.
Local governments serve their communities in many diversified ways as they increasingly engage in multiple connections: international, regional, regional-local, with nongovernmental organizations and through external nongovernmental services county actors. The book discusses how the shift in emphasis from government to governance has raised many management challenges, along with shifting expectations and demands.
Since the first elections of 1994, the South African constitution officially guarantees and promotes a wide range of political and civil rights and institutionalizes the separation of powers with an independent judiciary. This has made South Africa a political symbol of change, hope and democracy in Africa and around the world. However, since the introduction of free and fair electoral processes and with ANC dominating the presidency and the parliamentary seats, the political scene has been scattered by democratic challenges. South Africa remains a flawed democracy, combining free elections and respect for basic civil liberties with problems of governance, an underdeveloped political culture, and low levels of public participation. Today, South Africa stands at a crossroads. While the constitutional democracy has survived, South African democracy seems to have weakened by state capture, internal ANC implosion, corruption, societal polarization, social exclusion, xenophobia, and threats of state economic bankruptcy. South Africa faces growing discontent symbolized in intensified societal and political debates, protests and demonstrations providing for the question if this is a sign of dissatisfied citizens demanding deeper democracy or activities questioning the established constitutional democracy from an anti-democratic, populist, and radical point of view. South Africas Democracy at the Crossroads explores the question; what are the challenges to future democratization in South Africa?
The purpose of the book is to elaborate a planning theory which departs from the plethora of theories which reflect the conditions of developed countries of the North-West. The empirical material of this effort is derived from a country, Greece, which sits on the edge between North-West and South-East, at the corner of Europe. No doubt, there is extensive international literature on planning theory in general from a bewildering variety of viewpoints. The interested professional or student of urban and regional planning is certainly aware of the dizzying flood of books, articles and research reports on planning theory and of their never-ending borrowing of obscure concepts from more respectable scientific disciplines, from mathematics to philosophy and from physics to economics, human geography and sociology. He or she probably observed that there is a growing interest in theoretical approaches from the viewpoint of the so-called "Global South". The author of the present book has for many decades faced the impasse of attempting to transplant theories founded on the experience of the North-West to countries with a totally different historical, political, social and geographical background. He learned that the reality that planners face is unpredictable, patchy, and responsive to social processes, frequently of a very pedestrian nature. Planning strives to deal with private interests which planners are keen to envelop in a single "public interest", which is extremely hard to define. The behaviour of the average citizen, far from being that of the neoclassical model of the homo economicus, is that of an individual, a kind of homo individualis, who interacts with the state and the public administration within a complex web of mutual dependence and negotiation. The state and its administrative apparatus, i.e., the key-determinants and fixers of urban and regional planning policy, bargain with this individual, offer inducements, exemptions, derogations and privileges, deviate unhesitatingly from their grand policy pronouncements, but still defend the rationality and comprehensiveness of the planning system they have legislated and operationalized. It is by and large a successful modus vivendi, but only thanks to a constant practice of compromise. Hence, the term compromise planning, which the author coined as an alternative to all the existing theoretical forms of planning. This is the sort of planning, and of the accompanying theory, with which he deals in this book. It is the outcome of experience and knowledge accumulated in a long personal journey of academic teaching in England and Greece, research, and professional involvement.
This book presents the changing roles of urban governments and how local governments struggle to gain administrative, fiscal, and political power to combat current urban challenges in Kazakhstan. Focusing on the cities and regions selected by the national government of Kazakhstan to be the drivers of national economic development, the author analyses the impact of decentralization on the role of local governments. The book examines the practical experiences of city and regional governments with an emphasis on urban planning, public investment in national projects, and management of urban transport. Due to the complexity and irregular distribution of political reforms at different levels of local government in Kazakhstan, three separate studies are presented, each looking at a specific aspect of decentralization reform and local government function related to physical urban development and distribution of public investment. The author argues that, if the national government of Kazakhstan wants to concentrate economic resources in urban agglomerations, it is not enough to assume that local governments are ready to play the role of efficient planners and managers of urban development. A useful analysis illustrating cities and urban conglomerations as engines of growth in economic development, this book will be of interest to academics studying Central Asian Studies, in particular political and economic development, Development Studies, and Urban Studies.
English local government is in a state of decline after 40 years of incremental but cumulative centralisation by central government. This book is the first to directly address this trend's impact upon the institution of local government, a crucial element in the democratic viability of a unitary state. The process of centralisation, and its corrosive effect on the status and responsibilities of local government, have been widely recognised and deplored among politicians and senior officers within local government, and by academics with an interest in this field. However, there has been no study exploring in detail its impact, and, equally important, suggesting ways in which the growing imbalance between the powers of central and local government should be rectified. This book fills this gap. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of local government, and more generally to those interested in what has been happening to British politics and governance.
Most librarians are unaware of the laws governing the retention of library records. In addition, librarians often assume that state confidentiality laws offer more protection than they, in fact, do. The proper management of library records is an important legal issue for all librarians. This professional reference work outlines laws regarding the retention and confidentiality of library records. Part I explains why some library records should be saved and not routinely discarded. It also explains why public record retention laws apply to library records, and it then examines the variety of laws state by state. Part II discusses the need for strong confidentiality laws and traces the evolution of current laws. It then examines the current status of state confidentiality laws and demonstrates their weaknesses. While librarians often believe that confidential records are privileged and may be destroyed at will, this book clearly explains that this is not the case.
Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time. Escalating climate disasters like storms, floods, and dry spells lead to disruptions, social conflicts, and unrest. This book elucidates the reality of climate adaptation related challenges and needs in vulnerable territories. It considers cities, land use, anticipatory governance, and the role of civil society, as well as early warning systems and nature-based solutions. The research also highlights major obstacles such as funding, knowledge gaps, trade-offs, social justice, and multi-stakeholder cooperation. The book is unique in that it unites a variety of perspectives and examples from different regions to develop a thorough and nuanced perspective on potential climate change solutions and the barriers to behavioral change at all levels of climate-related decision making.
This book analyses efforts of Bangladeshi government and NGOs to strengthen local governance, and identifies the challenges posed by collaboration with NGOs. Presenting a dominantly qualitative study, the analysis explores whether engagement between the Sharique project to strengthen local governance and the Union Parishads has translated into success. In doing so, it argues that evidence points to a positive impact on institutionalising good governance and fiscal autonomy through widening participation in planning and decision-making, reinforcing accountability of functionaries and enhancing tax collection. Furthermore, this book demonstrates that the collaboration has aided the process of development of social capital between officials of councils and NGOs, as well as amongst the community members, encouraging future partnership governance. However, with the phasing out of the project as a propelling force, it also shows that the results fall short of being sustainable and, as such, that statuary support, unequivocal political commitment, and incentivising engagements are required to stabilise outcomes. Bridging a gap in the Development Studies literature, this book presents new findings on the collaboration of NGOs at the local level. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of South Asian Studies, Development Studies, and Asian Politics.
This book explores the social dynamics of the interaction between inspectors and their inspectees in the public sector. Government inspectors have a crucial role in enforcing rules and standards. The role of inspectors has changed. Their task is no longer to merely inspect and enforce, but also to educate, to negotiate, and to make compromises. Their decisions come about as a result of an interaction with inspectees: Do I punish or do I let go? Do I negotiate or do I issue a fine? Do I believe what this inspectee is telling me? Using insights from public administration, regulation and sociology, this book looks at the daily work of a diverse group of inspectors such as tax inspectors, veterinary inspectors, school inspectors, environmental inspectors or health inspectors.
* This book is comprehensive in nature, challenging in concept, written in the context of the current and future situation faced by public services and informed by relevant academic research findings where available. * Grounded in practical experience in public services policy and implementation. * Incorporates consideration of practices in other countries. * The authors have extensive experience of academic research, policy development and publications, coupled with extensive direct experience of public services, at a senior level, in the areas that they write about.
Distance, in its traditional sense, connotates "estrangement" and "division". But in the context of modern political studies, it means a controllable resource that can be manipulated to change the relationship between the government and the public. Drawing on this concept from Western political science, the author explores the law and mechanisms of China's political communication. In this volume, the author introduces a creative theoretical framework of distance, which is a dynamic system comprised of physical and psychological distance, ideal distance and real distance, and natural distance and consequent distance. Psychological distance is the core, because it signifies not only whether there is trust between a government and the public, but also whether the political community can maintain a high degree of harmony, stability, unity, and vitality. Events in the past five years in China are used as cases to illustrate the point. Students and scholars who are interested in political science and political communication, especially Chinese politics, would find this title a useful reference.
* This book is comprehensive in nature, challenging in concept, written in the context of the current and future situation faced by public services and informed by relevant academic research findings where available. * Grounded in practical experience in public services policy and implementation. * Incorporates consideration of practices in other countries. * The authors have extensive experience of academic research, policy development and publications, coupled with extensive direct experience of public services, at a senior level, in the areas that they write about.
Distance, in its traditional sense, connotates "estrangement" and "division". But in the context of modern political studies, it means a controllable resource which can be manipulated to change the relationship between the government and the public. Drawing on this concept from western political science, the author explores the law and mechanisms of China's political communication. In this volume, the author introduces the empirical investigation of the distance between government and the public in China. First, it discusses how the use of online social media, such as Weibo, can be used strategically to mediate the distance of offline communication. Then, it points out that social media can also lead to unlimited expression of general will, to which governments should pay attention. An empirical study on how rural residents of five provinces in China obtain political information is used to illustrate the point. Students and scholars who are interested in political science and political communication, especially Chinese politics, would find this title a useful reference. |
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