Localization

The term localization appears frequently in policy analysis within two contexts. The first we might call the organizational context, where localization fits with what have come to be termed new public management prescriptions for achieving greater responsiveness and customer-centeredness in the public sector by attempting to tailor services to local settings as much as possible. Localization is often used in tandem with decentralization as a governance strategy to attempt to achieve this greater responsiveness, but may have a different meaning than decentralization, which may or may not result in localization, depending on where the center is located in terms of geography or power at the beginning of the reform process, [Page 535]Localization, in the managerialist sense of the term, is perhaps best thought of in the context of center-local relations, with decentralization as a strategy for achieving greater localization of governance. Localization can also be used to attempt to achieve greater participation in political decision making from communities or even individuals through their greater participation in public services, and so is often associated with notions such as citizenship and choice.

The second context of localization occurs on a larger scale—if the opposite of decentralization is centralization, the opposite of localization is globalization. Localization is often held in a dialectic relationship with globalization—as the latter occurs across time and space, often as a force for homogenization, the former appears as a form of resistance to it. Here localization is perhaps even more politicized than in the case of center-local relations, often being used as a term favored by antiglobalization writers as denoting a resistance to the branding of consumer goods and public services. In the context of governance, we might therefore expect attempts at pursuing uniform “global” programs to be encountered by resistance at a local level where “difference” is demanded instead. This clearly has strong links with the first context in which localization is used, but here it appears to be used in a different sense, being a source of activism, holding more dynamic meanings than is often the case in the rather top-down assumptions held in the organizational notion of localism.