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.
This book explores the new administrative implications of local governments as they are interconnected with other governments and nongovernmental organizations in governance systems. The focus is on local system building, local politics, knowledge management, networks, interoperability, new forms of organization, and global influences.
Important policy problems rarely fit neatly within existing territorial boundaries. More difficult still, individual governments or government departments rarely enjoy the power, resources and governance structures required to respond effectively to policy challenges under their responsibility. These dilemmas impose the requirement to work with others from the public, private, non-governmental organisation (NGO) or community spheres, and across a range of administrative levels and sectors. But how? This book investigates the challenges—both conceptual and practical—of multi-level governance processes. It draws on a range of cases from Australian public policy, with comparisons to multi-level governance systems abroad, to understand factors behind the effective coordination and management of multi-level governance processes in different policy areas over the short and longer term. Issues such as accountability, politics and cultures of governance are investigated through policy areas including social, environmental and spatial planning policy. The authors of the volume are a range of academics and past public servants from different jurisdictions, which allows previously hidden stories and processes of multi-level governance in Australia across different periods of government to be revealed and analysed for the first time.
Effective governance is vital for all nations and can be made easier with advanced technology and communication. Through various collaborative efforts and processes, developing nations can enhance their economies with multi-level governance. Multi-Level Governance in Developing Economies is a collection of innovative research on the applications and theories of multi-level governance in the developing world. It illustrates the practical side of multi-level governance by emphasizing special policies such as immigration, innovation, climate, local government, and construction. While highlighting topics including Europeanization, politics of the developing world, and immigration policies, this book is ideally designed for academicians, policymakers, government officials, and individuals seeking current research on the usage and impact of multi-level governance in emerging economies.
In this open access book, experts on integration processes, integration policies, transnationalism, and the migration and development framework provide an academic assessment of the 2011 European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, which calls for integration policies in the EU to involve not only immigrants and their society of settlement, but also actors in their country of origin. Moreover, a heuristic model is developed for the non-normative, analytical study of integration processes and policies based on conceptual, demographic, and historical accounts. The volume addresses three interconnected issues: What does research have to say on (the study of) integration processes in general and on the relevance of actors in origin countries in particular? What is the state of the art of the study of integration policies in Europe and the use of the concept of integration in policy formulation and practice? Does the proposal to include actors in origin countries as important players in integration policies find legitimation in empirical research? A few general conclusions are drawn. First, integration policies have developed at many levels of government: nationally, locally, regionally, and at the supra-national level of the EU. Second, a multitude of stakeholders has become involved in integration as policy designers and implementers. Finally, a logic of policymaking—and not an evidence-based scientific argument—can be said to underlie the European Commission’s redefinition of integration as a three-way process. This book will appeal to academics and policymakers at international, European, national, regional, and local levels. It will also be of interest to graduate and master-level students of political science, sociology, social anthropology, international relations, criminology, geography, and history.
This book addresses the ‘bigger picture’ of local-European relations and adds a new dimension to existing studies on multilevel governance and the Europeanisation of local government. Drawing from a combination of European integration theories and operational approaches, it introduces the idea of an integration cycle in which local government responds to the top-down impact of the EU internally, horizontally and vertically. This volume presents a wide range of empirical examples to demonstrate how local authorities across Europe have changed their practices, orientation and preferences, and adapted their institutions and organisation. Not only do cities, towns and counties cooperate with each other across borders and through transnational networks and partnerships, but by mobilising formally and informally, local actors participate in and influence European governance and contribute to the future trajectories of European integration, thereby completing the integration cycle.
This book presents new research results on the challenges of local politics in different European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Switzerland, together with theoretical considerations on the further development and strengthening of local self-government. It focuses on analyses of the most recent developments in local democracy and administration.
This book explores the theoretical issues, empirical evidence, and normative debates elicited by the concept of multi-level governance (MLG). The concept is a useful descriptor of decision-making processes that involve the simultaneous mobilization of public authorities at different jurisdictional levels as well as that of non-governmental organizations and social movements. It has become increasingly relevant with the weakening of territorial state power and effectiveness and the increase in international interdependencies which serve to undermine conventional governmental processes. This book moves towards the construction of a theory of multi-level governance by defining the analytical contours of this concept, identifying the processes that can uniquely be denoted by it, and discussing the normative issues that are raised by its diffusion, particularly in the European Union. It is divided into three parts, each meeting a specific challenge - theoretical, empirical, normative. It focuses on three analytical dimensions: multi-level governance as political mobilization (politics), as authoritative decision-making (policy), and as state restructuring (polity). Three policy areas are investigated in vindicating the usefulness of MLG as a theoretical and empirical concept - cohesion, environment, higher education - with particular reference to two member-states: the UK and Germany. Finally, both the input and output legitimacy of multi-level governance decisions and arrangements and its contribution to EU democracy are discussed. As a loosely-coupled policy-making arrangement, MLG is sufficiently structured to secure coordination among public and private actors at different jurisdictional levels, yet sufficiently flexible to avoid "joint decision traps". This balance is obtained at the cost of increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private actors and a change in the established hierarchies between territorial jurisdictions.
Until recently, few gender scholars took notice of the impact of state architecture on women's representation, political opportunities, and policy achievements. Likewise scholars of federalism, devolution and multilevel governance have largely ignored their gender impact. For the first time, this book explores how women's politics is affected by and affects federalism, whether in Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia or the US. Equally, it assesses the gender implications of devolution and multilevel governance in the European Union, including case studies of the UK and Germany. Globally, multilevel governance is providing new arenas for women's politics. For example, CEDAW (the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) has led most governments to adopt gender-equality norms while other UN instruments have supported Aboriginal self-government. Gender scholars will find especially valuable what is revealed about the impact of political architecture on a broad range of policy issues, including gay marriage, reproductive rights and childcare. Federalism scholars will benefit from the book's wide range of cases, comparative themes and combination of gender and federalism perspectives. Written by leading experts, this book fills an important gap in both literatures.
