This dissertation is an evaluation of some of the basic assumptions of the literature on governance and their utility for understanding a specific case - that of Mexico. It argues that Mexican municipalities, like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, have experienced a change towards a way of policy-making based on broader policy-networks, fragmentation in governmental and societal bodies, participation of an increasing number of self-organised actors, and the resulting blurring boundaries between the public and private spheres. Mexican urban municipalities are evolving from traditional patterns of governmental interventions to dynamisms of local governance. This shift, however, has taken place in an uneven way, shaped by factors such as the complexity of urban problems, the political alternation, the federal policies on transfers, the different policy areas and issues, the looseness of networks and the way in which they operate. As a result, Mexican local governance has been developed in policy sectors that have a high legitimising potential or that are in great need for citizens’ resources. This has generated a picture of ‘patches’, where stronger policy networks and citizens’ involvement in policy-making coexist with traditional governmental mechanisms. The dissertation is a contribution to the differentiated accounts of local governance recently developed, which use diverse contexts to argue that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ form of governance. It is a reconsideration of the importance of local contexts in shaping policy-making through networks, as opposed to the initial context-free governance understandings. The conclusion recognises the relevance of the main arguments of governance literature. The thesis makes use of empirical evidence gathered in three urban municipalities. It employs qualitative methodological criteria, discussed in the methodological appendix. The main research techniques used were elite interviewing and documental analysis.

This neo institutional study analyses the dynamic interaction between formal/informal rules and agents’ behaviour inside a political institution, examining these relationships through primary research on local partnerships in Greece. The theoretical assumptions of this analysis derive mainly from normative neo institutionalism but also include insights from rational choice and the historical institutionalism. Consideration is also given to the way in which theories of the structure/agent duality are related to neo institutional propositions on the relationship between rules and agents’ strategic behaviour. The neo institutional approach to local partnerships is also situated in relation to concepts and empirical observations from the literature on urban governance, urban regimes and Europeanisation. This research adopts the critical realism stance which acknowledges a reflexive approach to reality and it applies an embedded case study strategy. The case study consists of two local partnerships in the region of Crete, which were established under the EU Community Initiatives Programmes EQUAL II and LEADER+ and coordinated by the Local Development Agency of Heraklion. A triangulation method is selected, making use of interviews, storytelling, a short questionnaire, direct observation and secondary analysis of documentation. The research data reveal that the formal rules of the partnerships are not indicative of what actually happens. It is the configuration of formal and informal rules that offers a deep understanding of partnership. It is concluded that some formal rules are realised (albeit with deviations along the way), like partnership and programming, while others are remained mostly on paper, like community participation, decentralisation and innovation. In these cases, the informal rules appear to be conflicting with the formal rules, leading to different results than those expected. The research also shows the importance of agents' intentionality in the process of institutional change. Specific actors within the partnership, such as established local leaders and institutional entrepreneurs, select and reinforce particular features of formal rules that restrict partners’ freedom and promote values of efficiency within the partners. Moreover, the findings confirm a gradual changing of local policy making and an increase of local social capital. EQUAL II and LEADER+ partnerships create new possibilities for the empowerment and participation of new actors such as NGOs and vulnerable groups in the local policy-making process. They also promote the establishment of policy networks and enhance the development of collaborative learning processes (trust building and sharing understanding). Finally, they lead to the re-articulation of mayors-chief executives’ relationship inside local authorities and of central state’s position by creating new possibilities for broadening local authorities’ autonomy.

From May 1861 until April 1865 the city of Richmond, Virginia served as the capital of the Confederate States of America, during the American Civil War. Throughout the course of the war it operated alongside the established governments of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the County of Henrico, and Richmond City. The body that experienced the greatest fluctuation and change was the municipal government, which consisted of a city council, mayor, and hustings court. The city government faced existential challenges that included an increase in its population, an influx of Confederate soldiers, and the constant threat of the Union army. While developing and implementing policies that responded to these situations, it refused to neglect or yield the duties that it had always performed. This included maintaining the gas and water works, funding police and fire departments, providing land for burial in cemeteries, and ensuring basic resources were available to its denizens.

Call number: LD2668 .P7 1974 S83

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Over the last 20 years or so, local government in Britain has been experiencing a relentless, rapidly changing environment. With successive Conservative governments introducing policies to encourage a new and improved managerialist approach during the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a shift away from the bureaucratic and professionally dominated type of administration to a more customer-focused, private sector style of management and service delivery. The impact of these changes has provoked many local authorities to adopt a more strategic approach. This thesis examines the strategy process in one such authority, a London Borough, during the mid-nineties following the appointment of its new chief executive. The process is seen as one essentially driven by the need for the authority to respond more effectively to the internal and external exigencies facing local government. As a case study, it explores the way the leadership, both executive and the political, moved the authority away from the former professional bureaucracy towards a more corporate way of working and management style. The thesis traces the perceptions, speculations and behaviour of the senior elected members of the political administration as well as those of the new chief executive and describes how these influenced the strategy process.

Collaboration provides a way of increasing the capacity of small local governments in providing services without reducing the quality of local democracy. The Thai government has been promoting cross-council collaboration with limited success while it has been widely implemented in England for decades. In the literature, little attention has been paid by scholars to the way in which the formation of collaboration and its implementation interacts. To generate new insights of academic and practical relevance, this study aims to generate insightful explanations about the role of collaborative entrepreneurs and collaborative managers in the initiation and institutional embedding of small council collaboration policy. It employs comparative empirical analysis of two pairs of cases in England and Thailand, set within an original theoretical framework built on the integration of policy-making models, the typology of collaboration on a continuum, and the notion of factors influencing sustainable collaboration. The thesis adds to the literature by distinguishing between and empirically demonstrating two roles – ‘collaborative entrepreneurs’, who initiate collaboration to solve immediate shared problems of resource scarcity and dependency facing small councils, and ‘collaborative managers’, who maintain sustainability of the collaboration and facilitate further integration across councils. It also reveals that the converse of resource/power dependency applies where the council with larger resources can become locked-in to disadvantageous relationships controlled by small councils with fewer resources. Furthermore this thesis shows that collaboration is more likely to occur where it does not challenge the vested interests of citizens and councillors. Building a coalition for change and developing collaborative culture are essential for enduring collaboration.

This study examines the impact of the Korean system of performance budgeting on government spending programmes. It sets out to examine the associations between a programme’s future budget and its past performance and also the impact of performance budgeting on managerial practices. Much of the study uses quantitative techniques – particularly regression analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Regression analysis is used to examine the links between budget decisions and performance, by analysing the impact on budget changes of SABP (Self-Assessment of Budgetary Programmes) scores (or grades) of programmes which the SABP assessed from 2005 to 2007. Secondly, ANOVA is used to examine changes in seven managerial practices: goal clarity, goal difficulty, budget adequacy, budget flexibility, budget participation, procedure formalization, and support from higher management, using perceptual data of 807 administrators in the Korean central government. This thesis found evidence of two main effects of Korean performance budgeting on government operations. Firstly, budget decisions have a statistically significant correlation with the performance of programmes or SABP scores (or grades). Secondly, Korean performance budgeting tends to initiate changes in programme-managerial practices within spending organizations, and to improve programme performance.

Local government globally is evolving in response to rising public expectations, changing socio-demographic factors and a growing focus on efficiency. The asset base used by municipalities in its service provision is changing to reflect this evolution. A new discipline of asset management has emerged prompted by a range of resource and policy influences. Its emergence reflects emphasis on a more strategic, entrepreneurial use of public assets rather than the more technical, stewardship role of property management from which it originated. In the past management of public property has received little critical attention but this has changed and a growing body of material is contributing to the advance of this new discipline. This thesis examines the relationship between rationale, practice and outcomes in asset management in order to understand the change factors that are a feature of this evolution of property management to asset management. An analytical framework was developed to measure why organisations do asset management; how they do it and what they achieve. This framework was applied through case studies to identify the change factors and to derive a simple typology of asset management to position organisations in the transformation process in terms of their approach and results. The case studies identified four change factors. These can be described as: strategic focus, organisational will, portfolio intelligence and an entrepreneurial culture. These characteristics were more evident in cases where organisations had advanced furthest from a traditional, paternalistic stewardship role of assets towards one of public entrepreneurialism.

In the Local Government Act 2000, central government mandated a change in political arrangements within English local authorities. Through introducing a blended separation of powers to the majority of local authorities, with a leader, cabinet and overview and scrutiny committees, the legislation moved the constitutional structure from a form of assembly government to a Westminster-style split between decision-makers and those who scrutinise those choices. One of the goals was to remove the party group grip on decision-making. Given the evidence of the strength of groups in authorities (Maud 1967, Widdicombe 1986, Copus 1999a) there are questions but no clear answers about how group behaviour has changed since this legislation (OPDM, 2002, Ashworth 2003, Copus & Leach, 2004, ELGNCE, 2004, 2006). This research assesses the impact of the change on major political parties. Due to the shift in the institutional environments, this thesis uses a rational choice institutionalist approach to consider how the legislation has affected groups; through assessing methods used to satisfice their goals. Using a mixed-methods approach incorporating survey research and case studies, the research has discovered that despite the reform to remove group influence, the legislation served to make local government more prone to domination by party groups.