The New Localism
The New Localism

Author: Bruce Katz

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0815731655

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The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work. In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges. Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation. This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on. New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction. In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

Localism
Localism

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Communities and Local Government Committee

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780215559951

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This report finds that the Government's desire to deliver localism is neither supported consistently across Whitehall nor implemented coherently by each department of state. MPs warn that the Minister for Decentralisation will need to bring coherence, rigour and clear priorities to the Government's programme. The MPs call for a more explicit statement about where the dividing line will be drawn between a central, light-touch framework for local services and unwarranted interference from ministers in local affairs. So far the Government has shown itself all too eager to impose its preferences on local decision-making. Ministers have also introduced policies that circumvent rather than empower local government: elected police commissioners, free schools, academies and health service reform, threaten to fragment rather than integrate delivery of better public services at local level. As devolution proceeds, the manner in which local decisions are taken come under greater scrutiny. Any reduction in the inspection and performance management required by Whitehall must be accompanied by stronger local democratic accountability. Broadening the provider base for public services is an important plank of the government's decentralisation agenda, but it remains unclear how far the 'Big Society' can expand to take on services and functions shed by statutory bodies. Localism should not be adopted purely as a way to curb public sector costs not least because the financial benefits of more tailored services may not offset the loss of efficiencies of scale. Stimulating greater democratic participation and civic activism will itself cost money if it is to be successful and sustainable.

Money, Mandates, and Local Control in American Public Education
Money, Mandates, and Local Control in American Public Education

Author: Bryan Shelly

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2011-07-08

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0472117653

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Pointing to the disparities between wealthy and impoverished school districts in areas where revenue depends primarily upon local taxes, reformers repeatedly call for the centralization of school funding. Their proposals meet resistance from citizens, elected officials, and school administrators who fear the loss of local autonomy. Bryan Shelly finds, however, that local autonomy has already been compromised by federal and state governments, which exercise a tremendous amount of control over public education despite their small contribution to a school system's funding. This disproportionate relationship between funding and control allows state and federal officials to pass education policy yet excuses them from supplying adequate funding for new programs. The resulting unfunded and underfunded mandates and regulations, Shelly insists, are the true cause of the loss of community control over public education. Shelly outlines the effects of the most infamous of underfunded federal mandates, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), and explores why schools implemented it despite its unpopularity and out-of-pocket costs. Shelly's findings hold significant implications for school finance reform, NCLB, and the future of intergovernmental relations.

Spatial Planning and the New Localism
Spatial Planning and the New Localism

Author: Graham Haughton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1134907710

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This book looks at the transition from New Labour’s ‘Spatial Planning’ approach to the Coalition Government’s preferred ‘Localism’ approach. Localism we are told will liberate local planners from the heavy hand of central government and allow planning to flourish at the local level. Alternatively, austerity cuts nationally mean planning faces cuts. In just two years the machinery of regional planning has been dismantled and local authorities are being asked to do more with less. Innovation is also evident, however, notably with the introduction of neighbourhood planning and Local Enterprise Partnerships. This collection contain chapters looking at the planning system overall, sustainability and planning, new approaches to infrastructure planning, and the critical interface between urban policy, local economic development and planning. This book was published as a special issue of Planning Practice and Research. It also contains a brand new afterword, written by the editors: ‘Localism, austerity and planning.’

No Local
No Local

Author: Greg Sharzer

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1780993323

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Can making things smaller make the world a better place? No Local takes a critical look at localism, an ideology that says small businesses, ethical shopping and community initiatives like gardens and farmers’ markets can stop corporate globalization. These small acts might make life better for some, but they don’t challenge the drive for profit that’s damaging our communities and the earth. No Local shows how localism’s fixation on small comes from an outdated economic model. Growth is built into capitalism. Small firms must play by the same rules as large ones, cutting costs, exploiting workers and damaging the environment. Localism doesn’t ask who controls production, allowing it to be co-opted by governments offloading social services onto the poor. At worst, localism becomes a strategy for neoliberal politics, not an alternative to it. No Local draws on political theory, history, philosophy and empirical evidence to argue that small isn’t always beautiful. Building a better world means creating local social movements that grow to challenge, not avoid, market priorities.

Consuming Visions
Consuming Visions

Author: Daniel Scroop

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1443806706

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The United States is the quintessential consumer society. This collection of essays brings together a new set of American and European voices from across the disciplinary spectrum of the humanities and social sciences to explore in innovative and challenging ways the “consuming visions” that have informed American political, social, and cultural life in the twentieth century. Ranging in subject matter from the anti-chain store movement that swept across small-town America in the 1920s and 1930s to the “bling” aesthetic in contemporary African American film, these essays explore how questions of consumption have been imagined, understood, and contested. While the collection coheres around the contributors’ common concern with how consumption has been—and is—political, its distinctiveness lies in the broad sweep of its disciplinary range. Furthermore, Consuming Visions illuminates a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the politics of consumption, with contributions from legal, social and political historians, and scholars from media and communications studies. Providing fresh perspectives on one the most dynamic sub-fields in American Studies, Consuming Visions will appeal to students and academics with an interest in consumerism and consumption in the twentieth-century United States.

Globalism, Localism and Identity
Globalism, Localism and Identity

Author: Tim O'Riordan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2010-09-23

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1136533753

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Global economic and social forces are affecting everyone, everywhere. However, their influence is shaped by local communities' interpretation of these forces and responses to them. Social identities provide a guide; they are the product of history, culture, economy, patterns of governance and degree of community cohesion. How the global and the local connect and reconfigure at various scales and through different cultures is explained in this forward-looking volume. The book's thesis, namely that localism is the crucial complement to globalism, is supported by a range of European case studies. Local responses to globalizing forces depend on the nature of the interlinkages in governance from international structures, through multilateral organizations to nation states, regions and localities, as these are mediated through social-local identity. The contributors draw on numerous themes in examining the interaction between the global and the local, such as decay and revitalization, local identity and empowerment, opportunism through sustainability and governance for the transition. This is a pioneering publication utilizing an innovative person-centred methodology. It makes an original and important contribution to the study of contemporary societies and is aimed at anyone interested in the social, economic, political, cultural and environmental implications of any move towards sustainability.

Localism in the Mass Age
Localism in the Mass Age

Author: Mark T. Mitchell

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-04-02

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1532614446

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In the United States the conventional left/right distinction has become increasingly irrelevant, if not harmful. The reigning political, cultural, and economic visions of both the Democrats and the Republicans have reached obvious dead ends. Liberalism, with its hostility to any limits, is collapsing. So-called Conservatism has abandoned all pretense of conserving anything at all. Both dominant parties seem fundamentally incapable of offering coherent solutions for the problems that beset us. In light of this intellectual, cultural, and political stalemate, there is a need for a new vision. Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto assembles thirty-one essays by a variety of scholars and practitioners--associated with Front Porch Republic--seeking to articulate a new vision for a better future. The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. In short, Front Porch Republic is dedicated to renewing American culture by fostering the ideals necessary for strong communities.

Accountability for public money
Accountability for public money

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2011-04-05

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9780215559029

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This Public Accounts Committee report addresses an issue at the core of the relationship between Parliament and government - accountability for public spending. The Committee is interested in the implications for accountability of two recent developments: the governance reforms which include Ministers chairing departmental boards and greater non-executive involvement in those boards; and the reform and localism proposals which envisage a significant devolution of responsibility for service delivery to a wide range of new bodies, in some cases independent of both central and local government. The reform and localism proposals raised fundamental points about the current model of accountability which the report explores. In practice government has long chosen to discharge accountability through the senior civil servant in each department, the Accounting Officer. Government vests in each Accounting Officer a direct and personal accountability to Parliament for his or her department's stewardship of public funds. While significant sums are spent locally, local taxes account for just 5% of revenue raised and so the overwhelming majority of public spending in the UK is routed through departments and is the responsibility of the departmental Accounting Officer. Parliament vests responsibility in the Public Accounts Committee to hold Accounting Officers accountable on its behalf. Sir Bob Kerslake has been appointed to review how the policy objectives of the reform and localism agenda might be reconciled with the current accountability model based on the Accounting Officer. The Committee sets out its fundamental elements for an effective accountability model.

Building the Federal Schoolhouse
Building the Federal Schoolhouse

Author: Douglas S. Reed

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0199838488

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Creating a truly national school system has, over the past fifty years, reconfigured local expectations and practices in American public education. Through a 50-year examination of Alexandria, Virginia, this book reveals how the 'education state' is nonetheless shaped by the commitments of local political regimes and their leaders and constituents.