Legitimacy of rural local government in the new governance environment

Since the early 1990s, the legitimacy of local government has been on the margins of debates about the regulation and governance of contemporary capitalism and their scalar forms. Yet, for those engaged in the day-to-day practice of local government in the governance environment, the question of how to maintain legitimacy is of central importance. This paper, which reports on the findings of a study of two rural districts in the South Island of New Zealand and Victoria, Australia, seeks to explore the interface between theory and practice of local government in the governance environment. Recent theorising about the implications of governance for the legitimacy of territorial local authorities is outlined, and recurring legitimacy-related themes in local governments’ engagement with governance are employed to construct a framework for analysing empirical cases. A brief (contextual) picture is drawn of the two rural cases, and the framework is employed to analyse them. Finally, the efficacy of this approach to the study of local government legitimacy, and the significance of the case study findings for the debate about the role of local representative government, are reflected upon.     

PARTICIPATORY SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Different types of spatial knowledge (expert, sectoral, tacit and community) are strategic resources in urban planning and management. Participatory spatial knowledge management is a major method for eliciting various types of knowledge, providing a platform for knowledge integration and informing local action and public policy. Knowledge types linked to a specific geographical locality can be integrated through geographical information systems. Recent developments in geographical information and communication technology (geoICT) have extended the opportunities for participatory spatial knowledge production, use and exchange. However, data reliability of user-generated content, social exclusion due to dependence on technology and the interpretation and implications of digital maps are major concerns. The challenge is how to integrate and utilize multiple knowledge sources for improving urban management and governance. This paper integrates the literature on knowledge types and knowledge production processes with available geoICT tools for the production, use and exchange of knowledge sources and applies it to examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America. From this review, we provide a heuristic framework for assessing the extent to which participatory spatial knowledge management tools can be instrumental on several fronts. We argue that technological developments of knowledge production have not fully addressed important issues related to accountability, empowerment, control and use of knowledge. Moreover, these developments may foster social exclusion, which could detract from the benefits of participatory spatial knowledge management in the context of urban sustainability.     

Situated legitimacy: Deliberative arenas and the new rural governance

Rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone far-reaching changes, as partnerships and other collaborative approaches have emerged to address the challenges of rural sustainable development. The legitimacy of this ‘new rural governance’ is purportedly grounded in deliberation between stakeholders, but this is problematic—it is not clear how ‘legitimacy’ is to be understood now that the criteria of legitimacy appropriate to representative democratic government are not obviously applicable.Here we propose an analysis of legitimacy as situated—that is, given meanings by actors in specific contexts—and continuously constructed through discursive processes, where it also plays a reciprocal, highly political role in shaping those processes. We use this framework to analyse decision making in three distinctive deliberative arenas for sustainable transport policy making in the Peak District National Park in England. Legitimacy claims were found to be significant elements in each arena, but no single, overriding legitimacy discourse was successfully established. Instead, each arena's legitimacy was a hybrid, justified through a complex mix of competing rationales.While no single conclusion can be drawn about the legitimacy of ‘the new rural governance’, the strongest legitimising principles remained those grounded in representative democracy. In contrast, the ‘new’ approaches rely on deliberative norms accepted only by (some of) the relatively limited circle of stakeholders directly involved. More generally, if such norms are to become accepted principles for legitimate rural governance, then more work is needed to discursively establish their acceptability both in networks of governance and with the wider population.     

Challenge of multi-level governance in developing countries and possible GIS applications

Of the three most prominent issues in governance discourse—the horizontal coordination of markets, government hierarchies and networks, global governance and multi-level governance—this paper argues that the last, developing and sustaining structures of multi-level governance, constitutes the most profound governance challenge for most developing countries.The paper identifies the major forces promoting change in favor of multi-level governance in developing countries. Using the growing literature and comparative national experiences (illustrated with the examples of India, the Philippines, Colombia and Nigeria), it highlights the key achievements of democratic decentralization as well as its nagging problems in these countries. Finally, the paper demonstrates the significance of these developments for democracy and development in these countries and shows some of the ways by which external partners—especially experts associated with the Geographic Information Systems for Developing Countries can assist and possibly benefit from this process.     

Between argument and coercion: Social coordination in rural environmental governance

Increasingly, partnerships and other cooperative forms of governance are common-place in addressing problems of environmental management in rural landscapes. These forms of governance are multi-dimensional in the policy instruments employed; the make-up of actors; and, the types of rationalities that actors use to debate the problem and proposed solutions. This paper pursues the question of how different modes of social action, represented in argumentative claims of participants, influence social coordination in these governance arenas. An empirical study is presented of agri-environmental governance in Australia where actors debate planning and policy initiatives to reduce diffuse water quality impacts from farms on the adjacent Great Barrier Reef. Forester’s conceptualisation of practical social action which locates communicative action in the ‘real world’ of interest-based planning contexts, is used as an analytical frame to identify: (i) the type of claims made by governments, farmer groups and other actors in argumentation; (ii) the claims association with communicative, strategic and instrumental modes of action; and, (iii) their consequence for social coordination in formation and maintenance of inclusive, legitimate and viable forms of governing. The study finds that the interconnected character of claims made by actors, and the ready switching between modes of action observed, point to a situated and dynamic expression of rationality within these contested and prolonged debates on how to legitimately and effectively govern rural environments.     

Making democracy matter: Responsibility and effective environmental governance in regional Australia

This paper will critically examine the changing social relations of responsibility associated with Australia's current regional ‘experiment’ in environmental governance. This experiment centrally involves the transfer of responsibility for natural resource management (NRM) from Federal and State governments to community-based regional bodies. Although governments are promoting democratic NRM planning at the regional level as a more effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, we argue that a tension is emerging in association with the simultaneous pursuit of these goals: ‘effectiveness’ has been defined in terms of the accountability of regional communities to central governments for the achievement of short-term results, an approach which is undermining the democratic promise that regional bodies would be responsive to wider community concerns. The notion of ‘responsibility’ provides a means of investigating this tension, as accountability and responsiveness are both elements of the overarching concept of responsibility. The examination of NRM institutions through this theoretical lens indicates that the shared substantive interests required to motivate a sense of shared responsibility amongst regional actors have been sidelined by the procedural demands of accountability. We argue that, if NRM planning is to be genuinely accountable and responsive to substantive public ends, the properly social and dialogical nature of responsibility relationships must be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social and political relations of responsibility that appear to provide the best opportunities for effective environmental governance, and thus for the achievement of more sustainable NRM outcomes, at the regional level.     

Consequences of governance restructuring for quality of urban living in the transformation era in Beijing: A view of job accessibility

One of the major issues concerning present-day public policy in a transitional and developing country is its ability to enhance the quality of urban living and individual social well-being in the context of rapid urban growth. A dramatic decline in overall job accessibility due to increases in commuting time is already a serious problem affecting the quality of urban living in Beijing. Understanding the impact of governance restructuring on overall job accessibility is of primary importance if politicians are to make policy innovations in development management. This paper applies the institutionalist approach to analyse the impact of governance restructuring on job accessibility. The analysis shows that current governance restructuring has a negative effect on overall job accessibility due to competition between different local governments increasing the degree of spatial fragmentation; revenue-enhancing development introducing constraints affecting the local jobs-housing balance; and the coexistence of the old planning system alongside the new market system leading to a fragmented land-use right transfer mechanism, intensifying scattered and low-density development. With respect to future policy, stronger municipal development management might be one direction in implementing public policy to enhance overall job accessibility, insofar as it addresses the negative impact of fragmented development management in the current transformation process.     

Varieties of multi-stakeholder governance: selecting legitimation strategies in transnational sustainability politics

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) are often referred to as the ‘gold standard’ of private governance. However, existing MSIs vary strongly in their institutional designs and the ways in which they use inclusiveness, procedural fairness and, expert-based strategies to create legitimacy for their rules. This article investigates these institutional choices. It reviews arguments about demand from legitimacy-granting audiences, isomorphic pressures, and the role played by institutional entrepreneurs, and intergroup bargaining. It explores these mechanisms in an empirical investigation of the formation of three MSIs in the field of sustainable agriculture. Its findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which MSIs adhere or depart from normative ideals of democratic governance.     

'For the sake of the deer': land, local government and the hunt

Political activism by local government is a well known phenomenon in Britain. Less known are the interests affected. In this study, Somerset council's decision to ban hunting clashed with the long standing activities of the Quantock Staghounds. My discussion focuses on the conflict between hunt and council as a conflict of governance in which land rights provided both terrain and techniques of struggle. For the hunt, land rights functioned as a foundational basis for the hunt's authority and legitimacy. For Somerset, their decision to attack hunting through land ownership not only reveals the complex relationship between land and rural state governance, but also placed Somerset's own authority in jeopardy as the courts declared they could not ban hunting on moral grounds. Somerset's land rights were construed by the courts as dependent on pursuing management objectives. Similarly, the hunt's political credibility was also dependent on demonstrating their role in deer management. The paper concludes with the problems of discursively fusing management and governance.     

Legitimacy and the Role of UK Third Sector Organizations in the Policy Process

This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.     

Participatory Practices in Organizations

The literature on participatory practices in organizations has been less coherent and more limited to subspecialties than the literature on bureaucracy in organizations – despite a number of celebrated studies of participation in 20th century American sociology. Due to the practical nature of participatory reforms and the ambiguity of participation as a concept, attempts to review participatory knowledge have a tendency to focus on refining definitions and clarifying frameworks within subfields. This article instead provides a broad thematic overview of three different types of research on participation in organizations, all critical to an understanding of today's dramatic expansion of participatory practices across a variety of organizations. Classic research studied participation as dynamic and central to organizational legitimacy. Institutional design research has focused on participation as a stand‐alone governance reform with promising empowerment potential, but mixed results in domains such as health care, environmental politics, and urban planning. Finally, recent research seeks to place participatory practices in the context of shifting relationships between authority, voice, and inequality in the contemporary era. The article concludes with suggestions for building on all three categories of research by exploring what is old and new in the 21st century's changing participatory landscape.     

New community governance in small rural towns: the Australian experience

State and federal governments in Australia have developed a range of policy instruments for rural areas in Australia that are infused with a new sense of ‘community’, employing leading concepts like social capital, social enterprise, community development, partnerships and community building. This has encouraged local people and organisations to play a greater role in the provision of their local services and has led to the development of a variety of ‘community’ organisations aimed at stemming social and economic decline. In Victoria, local decision-making, before municipal amalgamations, gave small towns some sense of autonomy and some discretion over their affairs. However, following municipal amalgamations these small towns lost many of the resources—legal, financial, political, informational and organisational—associated with their former municipal status. This left a vacuum in these communities and the outcome was the emergence of local development groups. Some of these groups are new but many of them are organisations that have been reconstituted as groups with a broader community focus. The outcomes have varied from place to place but overall there has been a significant shift in governance processes at community level. This paper looks at the processes of ‘community governance’ and how it applies in a number of case studies in Victoria.     

Interventions to Developing Community Partnerships for HIV Prevention Planning

Abstract

Since 1985 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have entered into a series of cooperative agreements with the states and territories of the United States to fund human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention activities. In 1994, the CDC mandate shifted from using a central entity to plan HIV prevention programs throughout its jurisdictions to fostering partnerships among a central state or territorial agency, health departments in local counties, and community-based organizations. This article discusses and applies a model developed by social workers to facilitate HIV prevention community planning at the local level. The model used to facilitate community planning emphasizes the use of the social principles of empowerment, self-determination, ownership, and inclusion to foster the development of community-relevant HIV prevention plans. This approach resulted in the completion of a successful HIV prevention plan, and application for continuing and supplemental funds ($6.6 million and $1.2 million respectively) from the CDC for HIV prevention efforts, the continued use of the model in HIV prevention planning, and the ability to use the principles of the model as a basis for providing future technical assistance in community planning.     

Building institutional capacity in rural Northern Ireland: the role of partnership governance in the LEADER II programme

Throughout the 1990s, Europe's rural areas increasingly embraced local action and local development solutions to face the challenge of the continued re-structuring of the agricultural industry. In parallel, in both the EU and the UK, a policy discourse has emerged which envisages a fundamental shift in support policies for rural areas from a sectoral approach (essentially agriculture) to one that is territorial. At the vanguard of these developments has been the EC's LEADER Programme. From a low base of entrepreneurial activity in rural Northern Ireland, LEADER area-based local action groups have acted as beacons for developing new approaches to diversifying the rural economy—in particular stimulating a significant reappraisal of the rural resource base. This paper charts the operational terrain of LEADER local action groups in the Province, suggesting that their strengths have been in developing the institutional capacity of rural communities and brokering connections in the local economy. Examples will be considered which illustrate enhanced coordination and collaboration of local economic actors and sectoral interests, and a strong facilitator role for LEADER groups in the local arena, with an explicit rural focus. The paper argues that this multi-level collaborative activity is rooted in partnership governance, enabling a communicative process among local stakeholders.     

Punishment,support, or discipline? Taking stock of recent debates about homeless governance in neoliberal cities

An interdisciplinary debate emerged in the 1990s about the nature of homeless governance in neoliberal cities. Contributions to this discussion have interrogated the form, function, and legitimacy of contemporary homeless management. Urban scholars have differentiated three techniques of homeless governance: punishment, support, and discipline. A subset of scholarship has defined punitive governance as an illegitimate act of repression that promotes urban revitalization by excluding the homeless from urban political economies, supportive governance as a legitimate act of voluntary or coercive care that helps the homeless survive a traumatic life experience, and disciplinary governance as an illegitimate act of production that fortifies urban political economies by including rather than excluding homeless individuals into bourgeois institutions. An emerging body of research demonstrates frontline workers coordinate these techniques of governance to pursue the aims of institutional elites. This article outlines the main points of contention in this debate, examines significant empirical findings that scholars have reported, and identifies salient knowledge gaps to be addressed in future research.     

Politics and performance: the implications of emerging governance arrangements for urban management approaches and information systems

Challenges to traditional public sector approaches to urban government have had an impact on various aspects of governance and management, including political arrangements, decision making processes, ways of ensuring accountability, the allocation of roles and responsibilities between public sector agencies and other potential service providers and between different levels of government, and the mobilisation and allocation of financial resources for urban development. These are discussed, drawing in particular on recent research on urban poverty and governance in ten cities in the South. The changing approaches to urban government and management have been accompanied by attempts to define criteria by which urban governance arrangements and performance can be assessed, which are summarised and critically evaluated. Finally, the potential value of a particular set of tools (GIS) for emerging approaches to urban governance is assessed. Their potential for improving the information available to all governance actors is recognised. However, because of their cost and technological and managerial demands, as well as the limited effectiveness of spatial planning and inequalities in access to information, plans for their use must be financially, institutionally and politically realistic.     

Inter-institutional relations in the governance of England's national parks: A governmentality perspective

Using Foucault's governmentality approach this paper analyses recent developments in power relations between different levels of government. Taking as its empirical focus the relationship between England's National Park Authorities (NPAs) and the UK government, the paper argues that there are two competing imperatives at work in the governance of England's national parks: a political imperative to devolve competencies to the regional level to allow for policy differentiation and an administrative imperative to manage and control the public policy process to ensure the achievement of national policy objectives in rural areas. Both imperatives shape the conduct of individual NPAs but to date the managerial tendencies of central government have been more influential in the changing governance of England's national parks.     

Rural governance,community empowerment and the new institutionalism: A case study of the Isle of Wight

This article compares two different institutional models—state-sponsored rural partnerships and community-based development trusts—for engaging and empowering local communities in area-based regeneration, using the Isle of Wight as a case study. Following a critical review of the literature on community governance, we evaluate the effectiveness of community involvement in the Island's small towns through a comparison of the performance of the two development trusts in Cowes and Ryde, on the one hand, and that of the partnerships established under the Market Towns Initiative in Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, on the other. We conclude that both models reflect the structuring effect of central, regional and local state steering of the Island's regeneration policy community but also that a ‘development trust effect’ is observable in one location (Ryde), due to a capacity to stimulate new forms of community enterprise and to successfully alter political relationships within the local community. These findings support a ‘new institutionalist’ account of community empowerment which emphasises the importance of contextual variation and locally specific processes of institutionalisation rather than the determining effect of institutional design per se.     

Re-spatialising migration governance: From ‘multi-level’ to ‘entangled’

Policy actors engaged in migration governance operate in complex environments characterised by spatial entanglements that bring together different levels and jurisdictions. While “levels-of-analysis” and multi-level governance (MLG) frameworks capture some of this complexity, they undertheorise the extent to which migration and mobility are both causes and consequences of other forms of spatial entanglement. This article sets forth an “entangled” approach to migration governance and applies it to the Turkish case. It discusses how historical legacies and regional ties produce enduring cross-border connections, examining diaspora engagement policies; migration diplomacy; and conflict and security in Turkey through the lens of entangled migration governance.     

Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.