Presentation

DECIDE: Decentralized Territorial Governance – coordination, capacity and accountability in local governance arrangements in complex regional settings

Project description

Resume

Local governance arrangements entail the capacity to engage in strategic partnerships to address a wide range of activities and tasks, to target strategic and cross-cutting problems; or may revolve around precise goals within one single policy area without a multisectoral approach to deal with the regions development problems. Regardless of their specific aims, local governance arrangements can embrace different formats – from more institutionalized to highly loose partnerships. This research seeks to map the wide spectrum of local governance arrangements across unitary European countries. Moreover, it seeks to chart the operational strategies to ensure the coordination between members, the capacity to secure agreements on solutions, and maintain negotiated consensus, and the strategies to ensure their democratic anchorage. It seeks to do so within a comparative framework. A within-case analysis is also required to understand the trajectories of local governance arrangements.

Department

Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences (DCSPT)

Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro

Email: geral@ua.pt

Telefone: (+351) 234 370 200

Research Unit

GOVCOPP – Unidade de Investigação Governança, Competitividade e  Políticas Públicas

Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro

Email: govcopp@ua.pt

Telefone: 234 370 005 (ext. 24324)

Goal

Local governments are living through an epochal transformation. Defied by political, social, economic and demographic challenges, local governments have been forced to operate within a diverse range of formal or informal structures of exchange and production with other government agencies at different levels – central, regional, and local -, privatized utilities, private companies, voluntary organizations and interest groups. It entails igniting complex negotiations, sharing and collectively delivering services, and securing agreement over time. Hence, local governance arrangements are dependent on the success of the coordinating efforts, their governance capacity and the ability to improve their legitimacy and their democratic anchorage.

Characterizing these three dimensions across the with spectrum of local governance arrangements becomes, therefore, of a paramount importance. On the one hand, these can be the variables that explain the success of local governance endeavours. On the other hand, acknowledging the inner workings of local governance arrangements is crucial to ensure citizens’ support. Better performance of local governance arrangements may have a positive influence on citizens in order to have a territorial orientation that extends beyond their own municipal borders.

Within this backdrop, this research project seeks to address two inter-related research objectives. First, it seeks to map the wide spectrum of local governance arrangements, focusing on both institutionalized and informal, sporadic alliances, across all policy domains. Second, it is targeted at acknowledging the functioning of local governance networks in terms of coordination, capacity and accountability.

These two objectives require two additional operational objectives. First, to devise a systematic conceptual toolkit that can be used to thoroughly assess and measure out three dimensions of interest. Second, the project puts forward a comparative assessment – by examining not just cross-country, but also within-nation variation – to test the external validity of the conceptual toolkit. This analysis will provide important information as to the variables that are required to ensure the success of these new forms of deliberation and service delivery.