Abstract
This ambitious and highly informative volume is premised on both the seismic shift in the perceived developmental role of local government across the globe, and the challenges that local governments will face as their key role in achieving the post-2015 sustainable development goals is increasingly being recognised within the global policy fora. New Century Local Government brings together an impressively wide geographic spread of country case studies from across the four regions of the Commonwealth, and pulls together work by leading scholars of local government who are all members of the Commonwealth Local Government Research Advisory Group (CLGF-RAG). It provides a plethora of detailed country case studies arranged around three themes: decentralisation in the Caribbean, Pakistan and England, local government finance and local economic development in India, South Africa and Tanzania, and new approaches to governance in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Not only do the papers provide detailed accounts of the changes in policy and practice within their focus country cases – but many of them, notably the papers by Brown, Reid, McKinlay and Sansom include a comparative perspective with developments from Commonwealth countries in other regions, which is one of the key strengths of the volume. It is also the raison d’être of comparative work across the countries of the Commonwealth, given the shared legal and administrative histories and the dominance of English as the academic and often administrative lingua franca. It would have been great to see more of the cross-regional and cross-country lessons being drawn out from across the contributions in a final concluding chapter, but the editors leave this to the reader – possibly to ensure they read the volume in full.
Highlights
Drawing on examples of recent attempts to further devolution in a number of Caribbean states, including Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, Schoburgh and Ragoonath show that with the exception of special constitutionally mandated provisions for certain islands (e.g. Barbuda and Tobago), as well as city municipalities (e.g. Portmore in Jamaica), there continues to be a resistance to uniform decentralisation policies in many Caribbean countries
New Century Local Government: Commonwealth Perspectives Graham Sansom and Peter McKinlay, Commonwealth Secretariat, London 2013 http://publications.thecommonwealth.org/new-century-local-government-962-p.aspx. This ambitious and highly informative volume is premised on both the seismic shift in the perceived developmental role of local government across the globe, and the challenges that local governments will face as their key role in achieving the post-2015 sustainable development goals is increasingly being recognised within the global policy fora
New Century Local Government brings together an impressively wide geographic spread of country case studies from across the four regions of the Commonwealth, and pulls together work by leading scholars of local government who are all members of the Commonwealth Local Government Research Advisory Group (CLGF-RAG)
Summary
Drawing on examples of recent attempts to further devolution in a number of Caribbean states, including Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, Schoburgh and Ragoonath show that with the exception of special constitutionally mandated provisions for certain islands (e.g. Barbuda and Tobago), as well as city municipalities (e.g. Portmore in Jamaica), there continues to be a resistance to uniform decentralisation policies in many Caribbean countries. Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance Issue 15: June 2014 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/cjlg
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