This thesis explores how an adherence to professional principles can be reconciled with a commitment to inclusive participatory planning processes in urban governance. Two themes are drawn together. First, the study concerns recent shifts in thinking about public participation that have resulted in innovative approaches to engaging citizens in urban governance processes through deliberative, interactive workshops and forums. Second, the study focuses on power relations that are inherent in such forums, particularly when a variety of different knowledges (expert and lay) interact. The two themes are brought together by focusing on the participatory practices of the urbanist movement - an urban form movement that draws specific principles from the urbanism of traditional towns and cities in order to create socially and environmentally sustainable places. Within urbanist participation, professional principles for the built environment and a commitment to a form of deliberative democracy are combined. In this study, the crucial question asked is: what is the nature and effect of the power relations on the democratic character of public involvement in participatory planning processes? To explore this issue, two urbanist Enquiry by Design processes were selected as retrospective case studies. One case involved a regeneration project for an inner urban area of a north England industrial town, while the other case involved a greenfield urban extension in the south west of England. The empirical research, undertaken in mid 2005, comprised 52 semi-structured interviews, analysis of extensive background material, and site visits. Research participants were selected to capture a range of perspectives and experiences of each process. To understand the power relations in the cases a two pronged approach was taken. The study was informed by literature from communicative planning theory and deliberative democracy. From this literature, an Ethic for Communicative Participation was developed as a heuristic device to evaluate urbanist participation. Concomitantly, to understand the nature of the power relations involved in the deliberative forum, the study employed a discourse theory perspective after Laclau and Mouffe (2001). Thus, power was understood as relational and imbricated within all social relations, while conflict was conceived of as an indicator of power. The study found that the urbanist discourse, as a hegemonic project, had a significant effect on the nature of the participatory processes. In disseminating and instituting a particular vision for urban sustainability, the urbanist participatory process was found to be instrumental to realising the urbanist vision in each locality. As such, the cases studied displayed a thin commitment to democracy. Moreover, the discursive constructions of concepts of community, representation, consensus and participation evident in the cases, exposed a unified and homogeneous understanding of social groups. Consequently, the complexity of power relations and conflict inherent in the processes were bracketed, resulting in the exclusion of certain perspectives. Nevertheless, the study illustrated the value in understanding the inherently antagonistic nature of the public sphere for both research and practice. The study supported emerging claims for a democratic politics in which antagonism is transformed into agonism - a space of reciprocity and mutual respect in which contestations over meanings can be articulated. In the cases, the participatory space allowed participants to challenge the hegemonic nature of the dominant discourses. Therefore, the thesis argues for two important ways to rethink power in both theory and in practice. First, there must be a willingness to engage with conflict and power. Second, there must be an interrogation of claims to unity or collectivity. Understanding the public sphere as inherently antagonistic, heterogeneous, and criss-crossed with complex power relations potentially provides conditions in which hegemonic forces can be contested. An agonistic politics has the potential to facilitate the open contestation of different knowledges and transform the dominant power relations such that an enhanced democracy can ensue.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-169). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2001. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2944. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-141).

Thesis--Münster. / Vita. At head of title: Geschichte. Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-264).

Thesis (doctoral) - Universität, Bern, 2002/03. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 385-413) and index.

Advocates of local economic development (LED) in cities confront the problem of exclusionary socio-economic outcomes, despite the purported pro-poor objectives of many local authority leaders. Most studies engage with aspects of this problem in a fragmented manner. This study examines exclusionary outcomes systematically by integrating the themes of urban governance, leadership and LED; and by applying Stone’s (1989) urban regime theory (URT) and Heifetz’s (1994) adaptive leadership theory (ALT). The study employs a cross-national comparative case study design, by comparing and contrasting LED approaches in the urban regimes of Leeds in England and Johannesburg in South Africa. It uses primarily a qualitative research strategy, complemented by the interpretation of quantitative data. Empirical evidence was collected during primary research activities undertaken from 2008 to 2011 using document analysis, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and non-participant observations. Thematic analysis was applied to the data and the NVivo software package was used to verify the analysis of interview data. The thesis argues that governance processes in pro-growth urban regimes are neither sufficiently networked nor adaptive enough to achieve pro-poor LED outcomes. These failures can be explained in part by the power of private business interests and structural barriers that tend to perpetuate income inequality and unemployment, undermining both equitable regime governance and adaptivity towards pro-poor objectives. Drawing from the perspectives of URT and ALT, the thesis highlights four inter-related factors which are central to a better understanding of LED approaches and leadership processes in urban regimes: (i) context, (ii) capacity, (iii) consequences, and (iv) collaboration dynamics and power. It concludes by identifying lessons for theory and policy practice, together with proposals on how determined leaders could begin to confront the intractable challenges of socio-economic exclusion in cities.

This thesis is concerned with the measurement and determinants of efficiency of local governments in the provision of public goods and services. In particular, the three chapters provide new contributions to the literature of fiscal federalism studying, from different angles, the relationship between policies that can stimulate the electoral accountability of politicians and local government efficiency in the provision of public services. In all chapters the measurement of local government efficiency has been obtained through data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier models using different measures of inputs and outputs employed in the production of public services. Subsequently, the determinants of efficiency have been studied using panel data models and quasi-experimental methods. The analysis takes advantage of the policies implemented by the Italian and the United Kingdom (UK) government in the last 20 years. In particular, Italian local authorities have been subject to an intense process of fiscal decentralisation, and English councils have been subject to a unique process of performance evaluation based on quantitative measures of outputs.

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Post-war Sierra Leone faces a deep deficit in the supply of basic public goods which is detrimental to quality of life and remains a risk factor for future conflict. The government, under substantial donor influence, seeks to address this deficit through democratic decentralization. However, evidence of the link between decentralization and improved public goods provision remains weak. I approach the public goods deficit from a different angle; rather than assuming that an imported solution is needed, I consider what can be learned from existing patterns of public goods provision. At the core of this study is a comparison of ‘success versus failure’ in local public goods provision in the city of Makeni, with the aim of understanding key dynamics that lead to divergent outcomes. While I set out to focus on cases of public goods provision led by two main categories of local government actors — elected councils and chiefs — I found that it in all four cases, citizens played a substantial role. I therefore analyze the cases as instances of coproduction of public goods. I find that coproduction is an important means of maintaining a basic supply of local public goods when state capacity is weak. With this in mind, I draw on the case study evidence to develop a set of propositions about the conditions under which coproduction is more likely to succeed in contemporary Sierra Leone. These propositions are suggestive of an alternate institutional approach to addressing the public goods deficit—one that is based on the development of workarounds for key obstacles rather than institutional overhaul. However, coproduction is no ‘magic bullet’; it has troubling implications for social equality and the development of state capacity over the longer term and thus judgements about the desirability of coproductive arrangements are likely to involve complex trade-offs.