Bolivia decentralized in an effort to deepen democracy, improve public services, and make government more accountable. Unlike many countries, Bolivia succeeded. Over the past generation, public ...investment shifted dramatically toward primary services and resource distribution became far more equitable, partly due to the creation of new local governments. Many municipalities responded to decentralization with transparent, accountable government, yet others suffered ineptitude, corruption, or both. Why? Jean-Paul Faguet combines broad econometric data with deep qualitative evidence to investigate the social underpinnings of governance. He shows how the interaction of civic groups and business interests determines the quality of local decision making.
In order to understand decentralization, Faguet argues, we must understand governance from the ground up. Drawing on his findings, he offers an evaluation of the potential benefits of decentralization and recommendations for structuring successful reform.
Sevastopol, located in present-day Ukraine but still home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and revered by Russians for its role in the Crimean War, was utterly destroyed by German forces during World ...War II. InFrom Ruins to Reconstruction, Karl D. Qualls tells the complex story of the city's rebuilding. Based on extensive research in archives in both Moscow and Sevastopol, architectural plans and drawings, interviews, and his own extensive experience in Sevastopol, Qualls tells a unique story in which the periphery "bests" the Stalinist center: the city's experience shows that local officials had considerable room to maneuver even during the peak years of Stalinist control.
Qualls first paints a vivid portrait of the ruined city and the sufferings of its surviving inhabitants. He then turns to Moscow's plans to remake the ancient city on the heroic socialist model prized by Stalin and visited upon most other postwar Soviet cities and towns. In Sevastopol, however, the architects and city planners sent out from the center "went native," deviating from Moscow's blueprints to collaborate with local officials and residents, who seized control of the planning process and rebuilt the city in a manner that celebrated its distinctive historical identity.
When completed, postwar Sevastopol resembled a nineteenth-century Russian city, with tree-lined boulevards; wide walkways; and buildings, street names, and memorials to its heroism in wars both long past and recent. Though visually Russian (and still containing a majority Russian-speaking population), Sevastopol was in 1954 joined to Ukraine, which in 1991 became an independent state. In his concluding chapter, Qualls explores how the "Russianness" of the city and the presence of the Russian fleet affect relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the West.
Haze pollution has become a new threat to China's sustainable development, but it may be that local government behaviour can play an important role in the prevention and control of pollutants. A ...dynamic spatial autoregressive (SAR) model is used to study the relationship between local government competition and haze pollution. To further explore the indirect impact of factor market distortion on haze pollution and control potential endogeneity problems, a newly developed intermediary effect model that incorporates the characteristics of the generalized method of moments (GMM) is utilized to explore how factor market distortion indirectly affects haze pollution. The research results show that regional haze pollution in China is characterized by significant spatial correlation, and local government competition has a positive impact on haze pollution; that is, local government competition exacerbates haze pollution. In general, local government competition not only directly leads to an increase in haze pollution but also further intensifies it by distorting the local factor market, and the intermediary role of factor market distortion is approximately 7.04%. The results of the regional inspection found that competition among local governments in the eastern region did not lead to haze pollution, and distortion of the factor market did not exist as an intermediary effect. However, both direct and intermediary effects are significant in the central and western regions. Therefore, an official performance appraisal system that includes ecological constraints should be established to guide the benign transformation of local government competition, and an environmental management mechanism must be developed for joint prevention and control to reduce haze pollution. In addition, the free flow of factors and marketization are equally important.
•Impact of local government competition and factor market distortion on haze pollution is investigated.•Intermediary effect of factor market distortion on haze pollution is explored.•Dynamic spatial autoregressive model is employed to control spatial effects and endogeneity.•The heterogeneity of different regions is fully considered.•Local government competition will exacerbate smog pollution by distorting factor market.
In the 1990s China embarked on a series of political reforms intended to increase, however modestly, political participation to reduce the abuse of power by local officials. Although there was ...initial progress, these reforms have largely stalled and, in many cases, gone backward. If there were sufficient incentives to inaugurate reform, why wasn't there enough momentum to continue and deepen them? This book approaches this question by looking at a number of promising reforms, understanding the incentives of officials at different levels, and the way the Chinese Communist Party operates at the local level. The short answer is that the sort of reforms necessary to make local officials more responsible to the citizens they govern cut too deeply into the organizational structure of the party.
Seizing opportunities, inventing new products, transforming markets--entrepreneurs are an important and well-documented part of the private sector landscape. Do they have counterparts in the public ...sphere? The authors argue that they do, and test their argument by focusing on agents of dynamic political change in suburbs across the United States, where much of the entrepreneurial activity in American politics occurs. The public entrepreneurs they identify are most often mayors, city managers, or individual citizens. These entrepreneurs develop innovative ideas and implement new service and tax arrangements where existing administrative practices and budgetary allocations prove inadequate to meet a range of problems, from economic development to the racial transition of neighborhoods. How do public entrepreneurs emerge? How much does the future of urban development depend on them? This book answers these questions, using data from over 1,000 local governments.
The emergence of public entrepreneurs depends on a set of familiar cost-benefit calculations. Like private sector risk-takers, public entrepreneurs exploit opportunities emerging from imperfect markets for public goods, from collective-action problems that impede private solutions, and from situations where information is costly and the supply of services is uneven. The authors augment their quantitative analysis with ten case studies and show that bottom-up change driven by politicians, public managers, and other local agents obeys regular and predictable rules.
Explaining local government uniquely presents a history of local government in Britain from 1800 to the present day. The study explains how the institution evolved from a structure that appeared to ...be relatively free from central government interference to, as John Prescott observes, 'one of the most centralised systems of government in the Western world'. The book is accessible to A level and undergraduate students as an introduction to the development of local government in Britain but also balances values and political practice to provide a unique explanation, using primary research, of the evolution of the system. The volume begins with an analysis of the structure of local government prior to 1832. Subsequent chapters chart its development to the more uniform system of the late nineteenth century. It is then argued that the emergence of a 'New Liberal' national welfare state and the growth of the Labour Party created pressures within Whitehall and Westminster for substantive controls over local governments. This has led post-1945 to the creation of larger less local units and further restraints on local autonomy. In addition, electoral competition among national parties to offer better public services ensured that national leaders could not leave local authorities to administer to local needs as they saw fit. The conclusion compares the development of British centralism with the pattern of central local development and the relative conservatism in re-structuring the systems in the United States and France and argues that the Blair Government may now realise the need for greater local autonomy and neighbourhood politics but as yet is struggling to reconcile this value with its concern to steer improvements in service delivery.
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.
That contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through cities is a growing theme in urban scholarship. Similarly, the concern that the economically marginalised are ...disproportionately impacted as ‘austerity urbanism’ takes hold drives a significant body of research. While it is clear that substantial austerity cuts are being downloaded onto cities and their governments, the evidence on whether it is the most disadvantaged fractions of the urban population which suffer as a consequence remains thin. Moreover, the mechanisms by which the downloading to the poor occurs are unclear. This paper identifies how austerity cuts are transmitted to the poor and marginalised in the context of severe cuts to the spending power of English local government. It identifies three transmission mechanisms and shows how these operate and with what outcomes, drawing on empirical evidence at the English national and local city levels. The paper provides robust evidence from national data sources and from in-depth, mixed-method case studies to show that the effects of austerity urbanism are borne most heavily by those who are already disadvantaged. It also demonstrates the importance of identifying the specific mechanisms by which downloading on to the poor occurs in particular national contexts, and how this contributes to understanding, and potentially resisting, the regressive logic of austerity urbanism.
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