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LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
A global presence?
Richard Kerley, Joyce Liddle and Pamela T. Dunning
Introduction
As joint editors, we are conscious that this book is ambitiously titled. We set the contributors an enormous challenge; they have more than met that challenge.
Authors were invited to submit contributions of their own research findings and wider work about similar features of local government across different jurisdictions. These were then grouped into relevant sections to create a wide-ranging review of different features of local government internationally.
We have deliberately minimised binary two-country comparisons in favour of a wider-ranging approach. This is because we consider that there are distinctive elements of local government structure, form, and process that can be usefully compared, contrasted and discussed in a number of ways across a number of international boundaries and in the context of a variety of national cultures.
In doing this we wish to prompt readers to think of some research themes and questions that could develop further opportunities for multi-national study and research. All chapters offer the potential for further research opportunities and we discuss these possibilities further below.
Two examples of different aspects of representation will serve to illustrate some of the opportunities we see for further comparative research that could help develop a better understanding of local governments.
Boston, Massachusetts, has a city population of approximately 670,000; the council is governed by 13 councillors and an executive mayor. Liverpool, England, has a population of approximately 490,000; it is governed by 90 councillors and an executive mayor. There is limited work published and available on whether such differences lead to better, worse or simply different forms of governance; even whether such arrangements generate different workloads for the elected representatives involved (McGarvey and Stewart, Chapter 5, this volume).
In a number of countries across (mainly northern) Europe there has been a consistent long-term trend led by central governments to reduce the number of councils and, in doing so, make council areas larger. Sweden has, over several decades, reduced the number of councils from approximately 2,500 to under 300; Holland reduced the number of municipalities from more than a 1,000 to under 400 in the same timescale. In France and Italy there has been much more limited change in the number of councils. Over the past 70 years France has reduced the number of first-tier councils from approximately 38,000 to 35,000; in that same period Italy has increased the number of councils from approximately 7,800 to 8,000 (Magre and Pano, Chapter 28, this volume). However, in both France and Italy, there have been major changes applied or discussed in the intermediate tiers of government. In France, regions formally created in the 1980s have recently been merged and reduced in number. In Italy, structural change â a reduction in the number of regions â has been discussed but not implemented, and various regional bodies are proposing ad hoc changes to the already asymmetrical powers possessed by some Italian regions. It would be interesting to further explore why certain forms of institution such as the very many small local councils in France, Italy and Spain have lasted, whereas other forms of intermediate institutions have not been as durable. In some countries the most local and small of councils seem the great survivors; other sub-national institutions wax and wane in their relative status and number (De Ceuninck et al., Chapter 25, this volume).
As editors, our shared observation is that in different countries, within the respective resident academic communities, we often see a focus on a relatively limited range of local governments from an often-limited range of nation states. Two of the editors (Kerley and Liddle) share membership of the editorial board of Local Government Studies, published by Taylor & Francis in the United Kingdom. In each volume, the majority of articles are focused on specific local government jurisdictions that tend to be those of the UK, northern Europe, Australasia and North America. A review of similar geographically defined papers from the journal Lex Localis, (published in Slovenia) over the past five years, suggests that there is an emphasis on local government across a small number of countries and a particular concentration on Balkan and Eastern European countries. The Canadian Journal of Local Government and the Australian Journal of Public Administration both signal their editorial focus very clearly through their titles, and this reflects in their contents. Both understandably concentrate on articles related to their particular countries of origin. As Swianiewicz (2018) has recently observed, studies of territorial reform and the impact of that for collaboration between councils have tended to focus on northwestern Europe.
We have therefore not encouraged an over concentration on the most often researched forms of local government systems in a small number of countries, nor have we sought to discuss every form of local government in every nation state in the world. We anticipate this collection will provide a wider focus that can be of value in developing different frameworks of understanding about different aspects of local governments.
What do we mean by âlocalâ?
As different studies have shown, citizens have different frames of reference describing their sense of community, or place-based allegiance.
People often simultaneously hold more than one geographic place reference in their head and they will use these in different ways to communicate with different agencies and different people. A man might describe himself as coming from âNew Yorkâ if speaking to a French colleague; to a fellow New Yorker he might say âStaten Islandâ. A woman who says she comes from Manchester is perhaps using the general description labelling the conurbation composed of more than 10 different local governments. That geographic term âManchesterâ is probably globally understood more through the impact of football than any awareness of local governments. These different senses of âlocalâ are also set against different operational and political/cultural assumptions about the appropriate scale of governments (in terms of landmass, population and local revenues), that have some responsibility for locally delivered and organised functions.
For the various functional responsibilities of local governments globally, there are different assumptions about scale, degree of local discretion that can be exercised within the confines of constitutional or legislative authority, and the manner in which local government units are structured and organised.
The forms of structure and governance are often dependent upon historical legacy and cultural assumptions. In Germany, the states1 are responsible for most public education, principally as a reaction to events in twentieth-century German history. In most of the constituent states of the USA, school districts, independent of local councils, remain autonomous entities responsible for schooling, with the original motivation of removing universal school education from âpoliticalâ influence (Benton, Chapter 13, this volume). In Finland and South Korea, education is managed by agencies of the nation state. In the United Kingdom, education systems are different in each of the four constituent countries.
Whatever the actual form of governance and actual tier of institutional responsibility for public services and decisions on regulation and resources, there are very few nation states where the central governing state alone assumes responsibility for all provision and all decisions in a given geography.
Therefore, the most common reflection of the importance of âlocalâ is the almost universal extent to which various forms of geographically defined sub-national state administrative or political divisions are found in countries throughout the world. This is regardless of whether these are jurisdictions with large land mass and populations greater than one billion, or the smallest state entities, with populations of fewer than 50,000 (Hassall et al., Chapter 9, this volume). Some form of local entity can be found in almost every nation state in the world; even North Korea has localised arrangements of âadministrative divisionsâ that are designated in various ways.
The extent, size, formal hierarchy and degree of independence of such localised divisions varies widely. It is apparent that almost every nation state has found some need to create local divisions of some form or another. This has been either as part of historic legacy â âshiresâ, for example â or is seen as a necessary political development as part of social and institutional development process, sometimes encouraged by international bodies. The creation of such local divisions has happened recently in South Sudan. In Pakistan various changes have occurred over the period since Partition, and the most recent changes to local government have included reservation of some decision making places by gender, religion and social class.
The terminology applied to describe such administrative divisions varies widely.2 This does however confirm such sub-state divisions â usually referred to as âlocal governmentsâ â with various mixtures of authority, responsibilities, and power are a near universal phenomenon (Hassall et al., Chapter 9, this volume). The only nation state that does not appear to have such sub-divisions of any kind is the Vatican City â the smallest state in the world.
Where there are such local divisions across many countries, we can often find a coherence of both structure and terminology; so âcountiesâ typically encompass a greater area than do âmunicipalitiesâ. However, large cities often have distinct forms of government that recognise their sheer scale and economic influence. In some instances, and in some jurisdictions, the term âcityâ, which most would typically take to denote an urban centre of some population size, has been attached to entities with very small populations. Missouri, for example, has entities described as cities that range from a population of over 500,000 to under 100 people. There are also occasional oddities such as the usage in Alaska of the term âboroughâ for local governments, including the mixed and widely distributed non-contiguous areas of âUnorganized Boroughâ, where more than 80,000 people live.
There is no standard universal form of localised division; one common feature however, is that such divisions, however they are titled, have a major role in delivering a range of public services, providing facilities, and regulating various aspects of social life (Mafrolla, Chapter 15, this volume).
Hesse and Sharpe (1991: 608) observe that âlocal governments . . . play a major role in the delivery of fundamental collective public and public and quasi-public goodsâ. The authors confine their comment to local government in the âWestern industrialised worldâ, but we would argue that this observation now holds more widely and across a wider range of countries than at the time it was first made. Changing patterns of nation state authority and global power have been accompanied by the growth of the varied forms of institution that comprise local governments globally, the services provided and functions fulfilled.
One other significant aspect of the word âlocalâ is to be found in the extent to which there are variations of organisational architecture and form within the jurisdiction of one nation state. This is not surprising in hard federal jurisdictions, where the structural architecture and processes of local governments would be expected to vary widely as between a number of states or provinces. This is clearly the case in the USA and Germany, for example, where the number of councillors in different councils â and their form of governance â varies widely between different states.
However, many countries have minor variations of governance that depart from the broad norm because of particular historic, geographic, demographic, social and economic features (Schoburgh, Chapter 12, this volume; Bissessar, Chapter 8, this volume). Sometimes such features create forms of local governments that have inherited legacy structural arrangements from previous generations of society and government.
It does seem to be the case that this is often pronounced in nation states that have a legacy of either former imperial power, or quasi-imperial power. The end of empire has often resulted in untidiness (Nickson, Chapter 10, this volume). The Netherlands has three âspecial municipalitiesâ, which are in the Caribbean. France has departments and communes in the Indian Ocean, in South America, and off the coast of Canada. Spain has two autonomous cities in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla. Both the US and the UK have complex relationships with a variety of detached island territories. In some long established nation states, even in core geographies, variation has often been historically present, particularly in relation to the capital city. Paris, for example, had no elected mayor between 1793 and 1977 and was directly run by the French government, perhaps because of a continuing residual elite fear of the power of the Paris âstreetâ. Washington, DC had no mayor until 1973 and no representation up to then in the national legislature. Mexico City and the Australian Capital Territory are similarly located on land areas with governance arrangements unlike that of other states within the two respective countries. London is the capital city of the United Kingdom, and has long been the subject of debate on appropriate forms of governance and the office of Mayor of London was only created in the 1990s. Nested inside the boundaries of London is the City of London, which has a night-time population of around 9,000, and an archaic franchise based on medieval trade arrangements. It does, nevertheless, have extensive powers, including the operation of its own police force (the smallest in the UK). In nation states that have very remote and sparsely populated areas, there are variations of governance, provision of services and control of financial resources (Kitchen and Slack 2004). Canada, Brazil, Australia, and some other countries all have variations of standard structure and organisations in their more remote âterritoriesâ.
While such...
