Local Responses to Global Change

Abstract

The changing meaning and role of local democracy are assessed in the context of the transformation of territorial social organization and local-global convergence. The autonomization of regional, local, sublocal, and individual actors is dependent on simultaneous supranational and global integration. In place of the zerosum logic of centralization-decentralization, focus should be shifted to the rapprochement of the levels of decision making and their power sharing. Advances in global integration are not a negation of localism. They contribute to the shift to a localism that is deliberate and open to the rest of the world. Openness involves an increasing choice of alternatives and a lower probability but heightened effectiveness of participation (voice) within local institutional structures. While involvement in undifferentiated, general forms of local democracy stagnates or even declines, participation with respect to more specific and close issues tends to be stable or even to increase. There is a hybridization of governmental and nongovernmental frameworks of participation that provides prospects for a strengthening of civil society.