Metropolitan Governance in Australia—The Sydney Experience

Abstract

The organization of governance in metropolitan areas has been an issue ever since cities began sprawling over their jurisdictional borders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adapting the institutional map by the annexation of suburbs constituted a first approach to reducing governmental fragmentation in urban regions. Another approach, pursued mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, consisted in the creation of two-tier metropolitan governments to which competences and resources were transferred for the management of policy issues at the metropolitan scale. In the early 1980s these paths toward stronger metropolitan governance entered a major crisis. On an intellectual level, research in the wake of the public choice tradition had consistently pointed out the drawbacks of the big-government approach inherent in metropolitan government reforms. Politically, experiences with two-tier metropolitan authorities had proved disappointing, and many of them lost support or were abolished. However, since the mid-1990s, exposure to the global competition for capital investments has renewed the quest for strengthening regional governance in many metropolitan areas. In terms of strategy the “paths to new regionalism” (Savitch and Vogel 2000) are thought to be diverse. While structural territorial reform still is considered something of a distant ideal, new regionalist thinking advocates voluntary cooperation among governments, public agencies, nongovernmental, and private actors as a pragmatic and viable alternative for achieving regional objectives.KeywordsCentral Business DistrictLocal CouncilAustralian CityMetropolitan GovernanceMetropolitan PlanningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.