Local Governance

Local governance mirrors the general development in Western democratic societies of decentering governments as policy-making and service-delivering institutions. Governments increasingly depend on other organizations in society for reaching their goals. Governments and their agencies no longer are the sole decisionmakers on the distribution of public goods. Governance, and local governance in particular, is characterized by cooperation between governmental and private organizations, joint policy making, shared service delivery, and so on. Local governance is to be juxtaposed to local government.

Local governance can be defined as Peter John did: a flexible pattern of public decision making based on loose networks of individuals. The concept conveys the idea that public decisions rest less within hierarchically organized bureaucracies, but take place more in long-term relationships between key individuals located in a diverse set of organizations located at various territorial levels. The concept of local governance can easily be linked to that of regime, often used in U.S. literature. The difference, however, seems to be that a “regime” is a nongovernmental coordination mechanism that compensates for the weakness of political authority, whereas governance includes political actors or is even led by them. One can, nevertheless, state that regimes are at the pinnacle of the process of governance; they are an extension of the processes of networking, trust building, and problem solving.

Governance advocates a specific approach to policy making. A rationalist approach does not apply to governance. According to Peter Bogason, policy making is not a rational process, but is characterized by cooperation, deliberation, and reasoning from parochial points of view. Even in the implementation of national policies, local governments have to adapt those policies to the wishes and potentialities of the local communities. They have to face fragmentation and new demands and are bound to organize contradictory demands. Paradoxically, the role of individual leaders increases. They may become more powerful, especially when they possess abilities to stimulate and persuade people and when they show a strong personality and charisma.