Community Self-governance Research Articles

Selective Intervention in Dispute Resolution: Local Government and Community Governance in China

The Chinese Communist Party faces a dilemma in local community governance, i.e. state intervention vs. community self-governance. Increased intervention violates its long-promoted social self-governance and undermines the regimes’ credibility and legitimacy, while less intervention may add to the risk of social instability and collective actions at the local level. Therefore, selective intervention is applied by local government as a rational choice in community governance. This article explores the political rationale of local governments’ selective intervention in community disputes in urban China. The authors argue that the type of community, the degree of homeowners’ solidarity and the media exposure significantly affect the likelihood and degree of a local state’s intervention as well as the local government’s response in the dispute resolution.

Community-based operator training and appropriate certification regimes for Indigenous water and wastewater systems

At any given time there are more than 150 boil water advisories in Indigenous communities across Canada. Recently, there has been greater emphasis on the importance of Indigenous-led management of water and wastewater on reserve, to increase control and decision-making power around water and wastewater management. This paper describes bottom-up, participatory methodologies and tools for water and wastewater management, specifically operator training and certification. Operators and community members from across Canada were interviewed about their experience with training and certification programs and policies. The purpose is to assess the level of community control, identify key considerations for enhanced decision-making, and propose best practices for operator training and certification for water and wastewater management in Indigenous communities. It is shown that policies and programs developed around training and certification for operators in Indigenous communities across Canada need to involve Indigenous peoples throughout the development of these policies and programs, in a collaborative, nation-to-nation approach. In addition, policies that devolve training and certification responsibilities to national and regional organizations should be investigated as ways to further increase decision-making and self-government of Indigenous communities across Canada.

THE EVOLUTION OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND SELF-GOVERNMENT IN RUSSIA

УДК 34 The article highlights the main stages in the development of local government and self-gov-ernment in Russia. It shows the specifics of each stage. The formation of the Russian state was accompanied by the synthesis of the princely power and the community self-government. The genesis autocracy was accompanied by a struggle with the self-government institutions. The creation of rural and urban self-government in the second half of the XIX century was accom-panied by a debate on the social and public origin of these institutions. The Soviet state was based on the unity of the Soviet system. It concluded the discrete de-velopment of local self-government in Russia. There is no historical strong tradition of local government in this system. Objective of the article is to identify and characterize the main stages of development of local government and self-government in Russia. Show the discrete nature of the develop-ment of local self-government in Russia. The formation of the Russian state was accompanied by the synthesis of princely power and community self-government. Genesis autocracy was accompanied by a struggle with self-government institutions. The absence of territorial self-government in Russia was offset by the presence of social class municipality for a long time. Caste traditions tradition had a negative impact after the establishment of rural and urban self-government in the second half of the XIX century. During the preparation of the reforms and their implementation were discussions of the rela-tionship between the state and the community began in management. As a result, there is the inclusion of local authorities in the sphere of active state regulation. The desire of the county public to the political activity was suppressed by autocracy. The Provisional Government at-tempt to rely on the local self-government to create new authorities ended in failure. The Soviet state was based on a single management system. Certain powers was delegated at the local level. The local authorities have been transferred some resources to implement it. So the system of local budgets was build. The most successful period of the local govern-ment activity accounts for 1920s. The city and district are considered as the territorial foundation of local government. Scientific field formed that studies the feature of local govern-ment in the Soviet conditions. In the 1930s, there is centralization of government. The development of the city is subject to problems of industrialization and development of the rural areas is subject to problems of collectivization. The state policy does not consider the interests of local communities. The liberalization of the political regime in the late 1950s has led to a revival of the idea of decentralization. But decentralization of government is considered solely as an economic rather than a social and political problem. This understanding persisted until the end of the Soviet period. The lack of stable historical tradition of local government negatively affects the municipal development of the Russian Federation.

E-judiciaries: a model for community policing in cyberspace

Online harassment is a significant and growing problem. Under current conditions, however, economic pressures and constitutional restrictions make actionable change unlikely. This Article proposes a model for community self-governance that may be termed ‘e-judiciaries,’ in which online community members participate in a process of reviewing and disciplining alleged participant misconduct. In support of this model, the Article examines quantitative and qualitative data from a major online community that has adopted this approach to self-regulation. Empirical analysis suggests that this regulatory design leads community members to adopt an aggressive approach to policing harassment. Such a system, expanded more broadly into other online communities entailing high amounts of user-generated content and activity, has the potential to work as an effective anti-harassment countermeasure.

Panarchy of an indigenous agroecosystem in the globalized market: The quinoa production in the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract Agricultural globalization is blamed for destructive impacts on small farms in developing countries. Yet, many local societies are proactive in the face of these changes and show high adaptive capacity. Investigating their transformations with an integrative perspective and enough hindsight may reveal some of the bases of their resilience and adaptive capacity. Using field data and the panarchy concept of resilience theory, we analyzed the territorial and social dynamics of quinoa growers’ communities in southern Bolivia over the last four decades, a case study of regime shift in a poverty-stricken rural society which deliberately entered the global food market. Linking the dynamics of the household economy to the territorial and social subsystems over several decades, we gained insights into the interactions that shaped the rise of quinoa production in the region. We found that a vivid tradition of mobility allowing for pluriactivity on- and off-farm, combined with community self-governance, explains how local populations succeeded in articulating individual agency with collective control over their commons of land, seed resources, and social rules. Our vulnerability analysis points to landscape homogenization, social inequity, and increased dependence on external factors as potential sources of unsustainability. We conclude that, to cope with the changes of unprecedented magnitude they are facing, local producers should retain social cohesion and autonomous governance, without giving up on their heritage of mobility and economic redundancy. As regards theory, we identified cross-scale subsystem configurations critical for regime shifts, and confirm the value of panarchy in capturing complex socioecological dynamics.

Placing community self-governance: Building materialities, nuisance noise and neighbouring in self-governing communities

In self-governing residential communities processes of governance through community appear to be triggering a contractualisation of neighbouring and demise in socially inflected relations. Research to date has examined the socio-political dimensions of neighbouring, highlighting governance frameworks and the social context as key forces shaping transformations in community practice. Meanwhile, the material space of residential estates has largely disappeared from view, assuming a static role as either a container for social relations or a symbol informing estate standards. This paper advances a different perspective, arguing that residential materialities must be taken seriously as agents within community governance and neighbouring. Through a case study examining the management of pets and nuisance noise in strata-titled apartments in Sydney, Australia, the paper shows that community governance takes place through the material environment. Understandings of community self-governance and the ‘building event’ are productively combined to re-place understandings of community self-governance processes.

Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism

Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism Joel Nickels (bio) In his contribution to Debating Cosmopolitics, Craig Calhoun poses several questions central to much transnational political theory: “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen of the world’? Through what institutions is this ‘citizenship’ expressed? Is it mediated through various particular, more local solidarities?” (90). Questions like these are at the core of many well-known theories of globality and locality. Arjun Appadurai, for example, examines the multiple ways in which transnational networks play a role in the production of locality, and Homi Bhabha examines the ways in which transnational flows of culture and affect are inscribed in local patterns of contestation.1 Less familiar, however, is the note of skepticism audible in Calhoun’s interrogation of cosmopolitanism as a political project. When “a large proportion of global civil society—from the World Bank to non-governmental organizations setting accountancy standards—exists to support capitalism and not pursue democracy” (92), what credible institutions of global self-government can we point to? Ultimately, Calhoun argues, if cosmopolitan democracy is to be “more than a good ethical orientation for those privileged to inhabit the frequent traveller lounges, it must put down roots in the solidarities that organize most people’s sense of identity and location in the world” (112); in other words, it must be built from the ground up, from “networks of directly interpersonal social relations, such as those basic to local community” (98). This ideal of local autonomy within transnational self-government is frequently invoked in contemporary theories of global democracy.2 But its practical corollary—what this ideal would look like in terms of institutions, practices, and regulative mechanisms—is often difficult to visualize. For example, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak notes that invocations of local, concrete experience all too often [End Page 1] construct the fantasy image of a general will based on “the credit-baited rural woman” who can be “‘format[ted]’ . . . through UN Plans of Action” in the service of an unquestioning “financialization of the globe” (259). Similarly, in “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism,” Pheng Cheah questions the capacity of local social negotiations to develop a contemporary political life beyond the nation-state: “In the current conjuncture, nationalism cannot be transcended by cosmopolitan forms of solidarity,” since “transnational networks are, in and of themselves, neither mass based nor firmly politically institutionalized” (1998, 312). Moreover, as Cheah further argues in Spectral Nationality, the depredations of multinational capital make “the nation-state necessary as a political agent for defending the peoples of the South from the shortfalls of neocolonial capitalist global restructuring” (2004, 300). In terms of its institutional imagination, then, transnational theory faces something of an impasse. According to Cheah, celebrations of “endless hybrid self-creation and autonomy from the given” (2004, 301) too often ignore globalization’s other face—forced migrancy, underdevelopment, and neocolonial domination—and tend to articulate purely cultural models of transformative agency, which fail to consider “framework[s] for the distribution and regulation of economic resources and capabilities to satisfy human needs” (2004, 299). At the same time, Cheah admits that the real-world emancipatory resources of the postcolonial state are perpetually contaminated by “comprador indigenous elite[s] in collaboration with multinational capital” (2004, 351). If it is difficult to imagine this transnational administrative elite transforming itself into a neutral arbiter of international justice—it is often just as difficult to imagine local communities evolving their own structures of international self-government without access to the formidable resources of state and interstate institutions. When facing conceptual impasses of this kind, it is often useful to return to technologies of perception and social speculation that have long been forgotten to see if they can furnish us with anything of contemporary value. It is in this spirit that I would like to reconstruct the intellectual environment and literary worlds of Claude McKay—an author intimately concerned with the problem of international and community self-government, but whose intellectual commitments and figural devices are very different from much of what is to be found in [End Page 2] current debates about cosmopolitanism and transnational governance. Like many contemporary theorists, McKay turns to the...

European Civil Societies Compared: Typically German–Typically French?

According to the ‘social origin theory’ of civil society studies (Salamon and Anheier, Voluntas, 9(3): 213–248 (1998)), the nonprofit sector of today constitutes a ‘repository of former societal struggles and conflicts’. Correspondingly, nonprofits are embedded in administrative and organizational settings, which in many cases date as far back as the latter half of the 19th century—a time when industrialisation and urbanisation started to exert influence in the western world. France and Germany stand for very different societal traditions, political legacies and administrative structures. Traditionally, France is a highly centralized country in which local governments do not enjoy much autonomy. In contrast, Germany is a federalized country where self-government of local communities was introduced as early as at the beginning of the 19th century. Against this background, it comes as a surprise that, aside from few exceptions, the nonprofit sectors in the two countries are very similar. How does this come? We argue that the reason why the French nonprofit sector of today is very similar to the German nonprofit sector is closely linked to the growth of the welfare state in the two countries.

Governing the Post-Socialist Transitional Commons: A Case from Rural China

When the collective declines, who manages the collective-owned land? When the socialist state fails, who possesses the state-owned river? This Article concerns the governance of land and natural resources that are still owned by collectives or the state in rural China. No effective community governance has evolved in rural China to fill the authority vacuum left by the dissolution of the people’s commune system. As a result, such land and natural resources have become real commons. In describing these I use the term “transitional commons” to indicate both the crucial influence of the transitional political legal environment in their emergence and evolution and their inherently transitional character. Transitional commons are often in crisis. The tragedy of the commons occurs when the cost of exclusive use is too high. When the benefit of exclusive use exceeds the cost, competing property claims arise over the common resources. I argue for an integrated approach to govern the transitional commons from the ground. Successful management of the transitional commons requires more than choosing the right property institution. A capable state and a well-functioning community are necessary to make the property institution, whichever it is, work. Rule of law is necessary to define the basic structure of a society and to guarantee the normal operation of the community self-governance. Self- governance can increase social capital for the local community to develop local consensus on property arrangements.

Cosmopolitanism and constitutional self-government

This paper, which was selected for presentation at the 2010 Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum, articulates the theoretical steps by which self-government in a free community of equals leads constitutional analysis outside the boundaries of that political community. Openness to the experiences in self-government of other peoples is commonly assumed to undermine political legitimacy by loosing citizens’ control over their political fate. But is it possible that such openness might in fact render that control more effective? Could it actually enhance political and constitutional legitimacy? This paper articulates and defends the following claims: 1) The legitimacy of a political order is partly a function of that order’s responsiveness to the claims of citizens for institutional recognition and/or action (or inaction); judgments of legitimacy are, in part, judgments about normative responsiveness; 2) Distortion effects inevitably occur when citizens formulate their claims and when institutions translate and process them; in a constitutional democracy, such effects widen when impermissible social asymmetries of freedom and equality become ossified in constitutional doctrine and discourse; 3) Political legitimacy and the promise of self-government depend on the capacity of the constitutional system to build self-corrective mechanisms as means for preserving its responsiveness capacity. Legitimacy judgments are not binary judgments, but judgments of degree that can fine-tune to the existence and efficiency of such mechanisms; 4) Openness to the experiences in self-government of other political communities (for instance, by using foreign law in constitutional interpretation) is a self-correcting mechanism – it can open access to a community’s own processes of self-government, and it should open access to its institutions. The paper presents these claims as elements of a cosmopolitan political philosophy of constitutional law.

Landscapes as a symbol of nationhood: the Alps in the rhetoric of the Lega Nord

ABSTRACT. While the dominant discourse of the Lega Nord, the party that proposes the independence of ‘Padania’, i.e. northern Italy, emphasises the region's economic success, contributions in the party literature on the Padanian landscape focus on the Alps. The Alps symbolise both the rootedness of the nation in tradition and ethnic identity and the intrinsic link between these traditions and modernity. They embody self-government of mountain communities and local traditions of political autonomy, but also appear as a protective bulwark against invasions of the Padanian lowlands. The focus on the Alps, an economically peripheral territory, is symptomatic of the reluctance to represent the environmental degradation caused by development in the lowlands. Contributions on the Alps, however, also reveal the tension between modernisation and the preservation of culture and territory and the need for new development models. Discussions on the Alps thus reveal the contradictions in the party's construction of a national identity based on modernity rooted in tradition.

Polycentric Planning and Community Self-Governance as Panacea to the Niger Delta Crisis

AbstractThis paper argues that the missing link in the effort to resolve the Niger Delta crisis is the neglect of indigenous organizations. Scholars and policy makers have underplayed the role of self-organized institutions in the governance of community affairs in the Niger Delta. The fact that stakeholders in the development process operate on parallel lines has been the bane of good governance and development in the region. These parties do not communicate with each other and thus have not been able to harness their efforts in the development process. Consequently, the problems in the region have become complex, and hydra-headed. This paper therefore considers imperative a multifaceted strategy that can simultaneously address these problems, and recommends polycentric planning and community self-governance embracing the application of eight African development models that cut across several sectors of the economy in the Niger Delta.

Gated Communities and Migrant Enclaves: the conundrum for building ‘harmonious community/shequ’

This article looks at the Chinese state's community/shequ building effort to govern a more heterogeneous and mobile population in urban China so that a ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) can be achieved. Shequ building initiatives move away from the governance model based on direct government and administrative control, and toward a new model of structured community self-governance. Within some communities, this new model has faced challenges that appear to arise from the new diversity of interests that characterize Chinese cities today. The article acknowledges that social complexity often begets organizational challenges for emerging shequ organizations; but it also suggests that the social simplification of individual shequ is a tendency that has wider negative social implications and needs itself to be resisted.

Rural democratization and decentralization at the state/society interface: What counts as ‘local’ government in the mexican countryside?

Rural local government in Mexico is contested terrain, sometimes representing the state to society, sometimes representing society to the state. In Mexico's federal system, the municipality is widely considered to be the ‘most local’ level of government, but authoritarian centralization is often reproduced within municipalities, subordinating smaller, outlying villages politically, economically and socially. Grassroots civic movements throughout rural Mexico have mobilized for community self-governance, leading to a widespread, largely invisible and ongoing ‘regime transition’ at the sub-municipal level. This study analyzes this unresolved process of political contestation in the largely rural, low-income states of Guerrero, Hidalgo, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Divergent destinies among pine forests in Northern Pakistan: linking ecosystem characteristics with community self-governance and local institutions

SUMMARY Community forestry is being promoted as a means to maximize benefits of the resource base to local users in rural regions, through the application of self-governance and self-regulatory institutions. It is argued that this bottom-up approach can result in a conserved ecosystem, and provide greater benefits to users than top-down approaches, where governments are often inadequately enforcing rules. The North West Frontier Province of Pakistan is embarking on community forestry promotion in native pine forests (Pinus roxburghii), but in many areas failures of such projects have been realized. In this study we compared ecosystem composition in three sites with similar ecosystem characteristics but different levels of contemporary user group self-regulation. Contrary to a prediction based purely on commons theory, our results show that self-governance by communities can lead to conservation of the resource base, even in areas where there has not been a long history of indigenous community forest management. Thus, common pool resources can be conserved by means other than socialism or privatization as argued by proponents of commons theory. However, we stress that government and non-government support agencies should consider maintaining a presence in community forest areas until communities are sufficiently convinced of the long-term benefits of cooperative management strategies.

Statism, Pluralism and Social Control

As we enter the twenty-first century it is appropriate to question whether social control through the legal order and institutionalized policing is effective and appropriate. As national societies have attempted to control and to protect against a wider range of contingencies, arising from a more complex division of labour, from changing social standards leading to higher expectations of health and welfare, and from new contingencies such as the threats of environmental pollution or the need to regulate information technology, so they have produced more and more elaborate laws. What Carl Schmitt called motorized legislation' has become a reality. It threatens the rule of law because the sheer volume of laws, their complexity and interconnection, and their constantly changing nature make the application of rules uncertain and knowledge of them, even by specialist lawyers, doubtful. Laws and subsidiary regulations cover kilometres of shelf space, and the operation of law becomes ever costlier--so much so that major companies are writing arbitration clauses into their contracts. At the same time most western societies have become more and more heterogeneous. In major cities diverse ethnic and lifestyle groups lead separate lives. Rules for one group about acceptable conduct will seldom entirely agree with another's--Born Again Christians and gays are unlikely to agree, for example. Outside of a thin core of public morality--almost everyone will agree that murder, theft and fraud are crimes--groups would be better off setting and policing their own standards. Citizens would have to accept that different rules applied to different communities with informal self-regulation and arbitration. Basing modern societies on communities of choice, democratically self-governing, would reduce the load of central inspection and rule making. This would both check rule proliferation and allow different groups to follow their own affairs. Laws could be simplified and, applied to a thinner core of common social life, could be more effective. Far from undermining formal law, community self-regulation could restore public confidence in it and by reducing the scale and scope of common rule-making and policing, make both more effective. Basing societies around plural self-governing communities of choice would enable individuals to exercise the option of doing things differently, but also offer the constraint of exit over excessive community regulation, since such obligations would be voluntary. Greater community self-control would tend to reduce inter-community friction, because individuals would not feel threatened that they would be the subject of legislation in matters of morals and lifestyles by artificial political majorities. The political doctrine for such a system of groups or community self-governance is called associationalism or associative democracy. Allied with the organization of public services and welfare on an associationalist model, community self-governance would strengthen the roots of modern social organization and make a virtue of increasing moral and value pluralism.

The Outer Limits of Community Self-Governance in Residential Associations, Municipalities, and Indian Country: A Liberal Theory

This Article provides a normative framework that seeks to answer the questions of when and to what extent society should allow dissident communities to opt out of general culture and govern themselves. It surveys a number of such groups and develops an ideal typical conception of the ideology that drives them. Drawing on John Rawls' Political Liberalism, the Article then argues that foundational liberal commitments require that society grant most of these communities far greater powers to self-govern than currently are allowed under the law, subject to certain limits that the Article identifies. The Article then applies its framework to the surveyed communities and points to how its proposed analysis would impact the law governing homeowner associations, local governments, Native Americans, and First Amendment jurisprudence. I further refined the framework in Illiberal Societal Cultures, Liberalism, and American Constitutionalism, 12 The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 803 (2002).

International issues in social economy: studies in the United States and Greece

Foreword by Branko Horvat Greek Periodicals Used as Sources Issues in Worker Self-Governance Issues in Community Self-Governance Conclusions Selected Bibliography Index

Equality, Self-Government and Democracy: a Critique of Dahl's Political Equality

D EMOCRACY and equality are necessarily linked in political theory. What is problematic is the nature of this linkage. Many critics of contemporary liberal democratic practice are concerned that inequalities in political resources among citizens threaten the very democratic character of these states. They believe that formal equality among citizens is not enough to maintain any meaningful conception of popular rule when substantive inequalities of political resources are too great. Some of these critics argue that substantive equality in political resources among citizens is an ideal standard by which to guide reform and measure the extent to which a polity is fully democratic. While initially appealing, such an egalitarian standard and its resulting strategy for reform is fundamentally mistaken. I shall argue that substantive democratic egalitarianism fails to appreciate the very complex and in some ways essential roles which substantive political inequalities play in a democratic polity. The relationship of equality to democracy is a complicated one. It is most adequately comprehended when we think of democracy as a system of community self-government seeking laws and practices beneficial to the community as a whole.

Community Self-Government and the Crisis of American Politics

Next article No AccessCommunity Self-Government and the Crisis of American PoliticsDaniel J. ElazarDaniel J. Elazar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 81, Number 2Jan., 1971 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291801 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Paolo Dardanelli Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Mapping State Structures—with an Application to Western Europe, 1950–2015, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 49, no.22 (Jul 2018): 271–298.https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjy019George W. Johnson Abstracts of Documents in this Supplement, (Jan 1979): 1–473.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5166-3_1John P. Mclver The Relationship Between Metropolitan Police Industry Structure and Interagency Assistance: A Preliminary Assessment, Policy Studies Journal 7, no.s1s1 (Dec 1978): 406–413.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.1978.tb01785.xVincent Ostrom Some Problems in Doing Political Theory: A Response to Golembiewski's “Critique”, American Political Science Review 71, no.44 (Aug 2014): 1508–1525.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055400269736Vincent Ostrom Some Problems in Doing Political Theory: A Response to Golembiewski's “Critique”, American Political Science Review 71, no.44 (Aug 2014): 1508–1525.https://doi.org/10.2307/1961492