Municipal Level Of Government Research Articles

Have We Legalized Corruption? The Impacts of Expanding Municipal Authority Without Safeguards in Toronto and Ontario

This article discusses the importance of rule of law values such as predictability, certainty, equality, and procedural safeguards in controlling corruption at the municipal level of government and how those values are being replaced by political and economic values such as efficiency, discretion, responsiveness, and need. Particular attention is placed on how this change in values may lead to corruption and the abuse of power in planning and other decisions made by municipal governments.

Water Governance Decentralisation and River Basin Management Reforms in Hierarchical Systems: Do They Work for Water Treatment Policy in Mexico’s Tlaxcala Atoyac Sub-Basin?

In the last decades, policy reforms, new instruments development, and economic resources investment have taken place in water sanitation in Mexico; however, the intended goals have not been accomplished. The percentage of treated wastewater as intended in the last two federal water plans has not been achieved. The creation of River Basin Commissions and the decentralisation process have also faced challenges. In the case of Tlaxcala, the River Basin Commission exists only on paper and the municipalities do not have the resources to fulfil the water treatment responsibilities transferred to them. This lack of results poses the question whether the context was sufficiently considered when the reforms were enacted. In this research, we will study the Tlaxcala Atoyac sub-basin, where water treatment policy reforms have taken place recently with a more context sensitive approach. We will apply the Governance Assessment Tool in order to find out whether the last reforms are indeed apt for the context. The Governance Assessment Tool includes four qualities, namely extent, coherence, flexibility, and intensity. The assessment allows deeper understanding of the governance context. Data collection involved semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders. The research concludes that the observed combination of qualities creates a governance context that partially supports the implementation of the policy. This has helped to increase the percentage of wastewater treated, but the water quality goals set by the River Classification have not been achieved. With the last reforms, in this hierarchical context, decreasing the participation of municipal government levels has been shown to be instrumental for improving water treatment plants implementation policy, although many challenges remain to be addressed.

Designing and Delivering Leadership Programs: Challenges and Prospects

The question addressed in this chapter is how to design and deliver leadership training programs that have impact not only on the participants but also on the communities they serve and the organizations they lead. The transformation of the public sector calls for growing leaders who can thrive in ambiguity and work across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors to lead effective change. This question of how to grow leaders is addressed by drawing on my personal experience designing and delivering leadership programs at the national, state, regional, county, and municipal government levels, as well as for a foundation in the nonprofit health sector. Over 2,000 participants have engaged in this leadership training over the past five years. Participants have been from a wide range of professional fields. Design and delivery lessons are drawn from a rich set of observations, including formal program evaluations, focus group interviews with program graduates, pre- and post-leadership assessment tests, narrative inquiry, end of program interviews, alumni observations and interviews, daily feedback forms (thousands), debriefing of presenters, individual conversations with participants during and after programs, and discussion with program sponsors. This data collection occurred over the past seven years.

GOVERNMENT BUDGET CRISES

In a recent New York Times opinion piece (August 21, 2015), Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman repeated his astonishing claim that Debt is Good, referring to national debt, offering for our consideration that, since interest rates are so low, the U.S. government could borrow more money and take care of our collapsing infrastructure, giving the economy' a boost to boot! (Never mind that the national debt is now over 18 trillion dollars and growing like an aggressive tumor).Despite Krugman's claim that the debt is owed to ourselves and thus not to be taken seriously, budget crises - at the international, national/ federal, state, count)' and municipal levels of government - are routine and disconcerting. The recent history of Greece is a good - and very troublesome - case in point, not to mention Puerto Rico, closer to home. Notwithstanding occasional and sporadic surpluses of one or two years, in most regions these respites are followed by many years of debt financing. If governments were held to the standards of private firms, a great many of them would have to declare bankruptcy. However, since governments can tax their citizens to raise funds - or, in the case of the federal governments of most countries, print money - governments can delay those consequences for a future generation of citizens and a different administration to confront the inevitable.Why do governments get into such straps so often? Only rarely is it due to corruption: rather, the problem is systemic.Essentially, governments lack the requisite basis (information source) for assessing the relationship between their resources and their expenses. In other words, since the means by which that relationship is most effectively understood is unavailable to governments, they are unavoidably ill informed, seriously undermining financial planning. Let us see how this is so.The Calculation ProblemLudwig von Mises, the leading economist of the Austrian School, established as far back as 19221 that meaningful and useful economic and financial calculation requires a free market place where people - for whom governments work - can allocate their resources by selling and/or buying as they deem fit. These millions of purchasing instances communicate to producers in the market place what is in demand, what customers are likely to buy, as well as what they will leave sitting on shelves or dispose of otherwise. This information is vital for producers in estimating what they need to do. Inventories and production quotas, among other things, will be adjusted, very closely, to what people who shop are likely to purchase.The system that best communicates this information between millions of buyers and sellers is free market capitalism. Further, people in such a system have a reasonably clear idea of what belongs to them, through the institution of private property rights. So, they know what they can spend and what would break their budgets. Even buying on credit is adjusted to their capacity to carry debts. In short, a free market provides a very clear warning signal about overspending.An economic system with this advantage is less likely to experience major vacillations, including financial crises, because, on average, people will balance their economic purchases with their available resources. Put that in terms of several hundred million transactions in the market place, and a very complex yet largely smoothly functioning system results.2Von Mises, and his most famous student Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, presented these ideas in the great debate about whether socialist economies can function.3 As one of the most famous American (Marxist) socialist economists put it recently, ...Ludwig von Mises...had written of the 'impossibility' of socialism, arguing that no Central Planning Board could ever gather the enormous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system.... It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. …

Perceptions of the ecosystem services concept: Opportunities and challenges in the Swedish municipal context

A current focus of ecosystem services (ES) implementation is on the municipal level of government where international and national legislation and policies have to be translated into practice. Given this focus, an understanding of perceptions within municipalities of the ES concept is crucial to support the implementation process. Against this background, this paper examines the perceptions of Swedish municipal stakeholders for the ES concept. A 2013 Swedish federal mandate that states that the values of ecosystem services should be considered in relevant decision-making processes, provides a timely context. Current perceptions, preconditions and awareness are explored via interviews and analyses. The results show that the views on the ecosystem services concept and its usefulness are generally very positive. Conceptual knowledge use is perceived as important as is the recognition of monetary valuation of ES. However, clarification of the distinction between implicit and explicit use of the concept by stakeholders is needed. Finally, results indicate that a deeper understanding of monetary valuation of ecosystem services by municipal staff members is connected with a more critical view on monetary valuation. It is concluded that detailed and clear definitions and guidelines are needed in order to support the process of implementing ES in municipalities.

Protest Patterns in Provincial Russia: a Paired Comparison of Company Towns

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia implemented reforms aimed at transitioning to a market economy and devolving power to regional and municipal levels of government. Although it is well known that these reforms created significant uncertainty, economic crises, and protest, most existing studies do not explore the considerable variation in protest patterns across localities. This article asks why, despite similar pressures, some cities have experienced protests that are consistently larger and more intense than others. Focusing on the context of the many company towns that emerged during Soviet industrialization, I construct a paired comparison of two average-sized company towns using process tracing through interviews and archival documents. This article also employs an original protest database created through newspaper analysis that tracks not only the instances of protest but also protest size, demands, and targets. What emerges are two pathways that explain the divergent protest structures in the two company towns studied. In Cherepovets, a city that is less dependent on the central state, local elites pursued strategies of co-optation and suppression, limiting the opportunity structure for contentious politics to small-scale, local protests. In Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a city where the primary industry is in decline and dependent on support from the center, local elites converged with opposition groups to improve their bargaining position vis-a-vis the central government; this produced protests that were larger and more extreme and targeted the system as a whole.

Change and continuity in post-Katrina New Orleans

In post-Katrina New Orleans the City Charter endorses the designation of the City Planning Commission (CPC) as the lead agency for both urban and recovery planning. The municipal level of government and the theory and practice of planning thus achieve positions of dominance in the recovery process. The paper notes a number of correspondences between the New Orleans model and Habraken's hierarchy of control of urban change, in which control over the top level, the city, confers dominance over the actions of agents operating at all lower levels. The post-Katrina planning literature records, however, that despite its mandate the CPC becomes just one agency operating within a competitive context in which the cataclysmic destruction of the physical environment is not reflected in the associated social structure of the city's agents of change. A considerable continuity of tenure within the membership of the city level's agents emerges from the literature, and the control of the recovery planning process becomes a common objective. The paper concludes with an assessment of the degree to which they succeed in exerting a controlling influence on the content and implementation of the recovery plans.

Making a Difference: Strategic Positioning in Municipal Reputation Building

This article adds to current literature on municipal competitiveness by examining the positioning strategies of Norwegian municipalities. Norwegian municipalities are faced with strong similarity pressures from both central government and regional peers, but are also expected to differentiate and tailor services to local needs. Following the introduction of reputation management, differentiation pressures grow stronger. This study shows how concerns of reputation, differentiation and municipal competitiveness are connected and integrated into strategic thinking, but also that similarity concerns and pressures influence the level of differentiation. The article discusses the general implications of these findings for our understanding of the tension between similarity and difference in a local government context as it relates to reputation management work at the municipal level of government.

Municipal flood hazard mapping: the case of British Columbia, Canada

Historical responses to flood hazards have stimulated development in hazardous areas. Scholars recommend an alternative approach to reducing flood losses that combines flood hazard mapping with land use planning to identify and direct development away from flood-prone areas. Creating flood hazard maps to inform municipal land use planning is an expensive and complex process that can require resources not always available at the municipal government level. Senior levels of government in some countries have addressed deficiencies in municipal capacity by assuming an active role in producing municipal flood hazard maps. In other countries, however, senior governments do not contribute to municipal flood hazard mapping. Despite a large body of research on the importance of municipal land use planning for addressing flood hazards, little is known about the extent of flood hazard information that is available to municipalities that do not receive outside assistance from senior governments for flood hazard mapping. We assess the status of flood hazard maps in British Columbia, where municipalities do not receive outside assistance in creating the maps. Our analysis shows that these maps are generally outdated and/or lacking a variety of features that are critical for supporting effective land use planning. We recommend that senior levels of government play an active role in providing municipalities with (1) detailed and current information regarding flood hazards in their jurisdiction and (2) compelling incentives to utilize this information.

Thoughts Towards a New Definition of Heritage

Up until now, values associated with heritage are generally similar: places are usually deemed worthy of preservation for their historical associations to important people or events, their aesthetic/architectural qualities, and their physical relation to their surrounding context. But, in the future, can these remain the only reasons for preserving a place? In the interests of pursuing the natural alliance between sustainable development and heritage conservation, the question begs to be asked in the particular context of heritage evaluations. Beyond its traditional cultural meanings, can the definition of heritage continue to broaden to encompass sustainability’s criteria? This article proposes to examine how the paradigm of sustainable development can be incorporated in the current heritage evaluation methods used in Canada’s federal and municipal levels of government. The Port of Montreal’s grain elevator no. 5 (Silo No. 5), built between 1906 and 1958 and currently awaiting a new use, will be examined. By virtue of its size, situation, and volume, Silo No. 5 can provoke an interesting discussion about the possibilities of integrating social, economic, and environmental issues in heritage conservation processes.

Cultural Rights Versus Civic Virtue?

1. IntroductionThis paper will address the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: one, the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and two, the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local and the advancement of common civic enterprises.Many political liberals have argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various subgroups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The to cultural is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality.Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions have expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists have argued that common projects, shared norms, and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice.These two policy goals therefore may at times conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger, culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust, and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and subgroup identification of some minority groups. Accommodation of any and all subgroup cultural practices will make it difficult if not impossible to foster a common civic culture and social trust.Programmatically speaking, the paper will argue that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle trade-offs that these conflicts often entail. While local government and public institutions must be sensitive to the needs of all cultural groups that they affect, the need for civic enterprise and social trust should not be subject to absolute and nonnegotiable demands for the accommodation of cultural traditions. The accommodation of some cultural traditions wiU impose severe costs in terms of strife, conflict, and the inability effectively to pursue other important social goals - in at least some cases, the cultural traditions, and not the other social goals, should yield.2. Rights to Cultural Difference and Civic VirtueAvishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal begin their essay: Liberalism and the Right to Culture with this sentence: Beings have a right to culture - not just any culture, but their own.1 The rest of the essay is concerned, not with defending this proposition, but with exploring how it might be put into practice. This is only one example of a very widely held conviction. For many, one of the most crucial imperatives of a multicultural society is what one might call a to culture. Many argue that the statement in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community, entails a right to cultural difference: the right of ethnic and cultural subgroups to retain and perpetuate the practices, norms, and mores of their culture.A right to culture may be a rhetorical figure meant to signal a significant ideological commitment. As an ideological commitment, the right to culture may take the form of a general commitment to learn about and respect the cultural traditions of various culturally distinct groups in a society. It would counsel tolerance of cultural difference and an embrace of a multicultural society; it would stand in opposition to the policies of national assimilation that have so often characterized the nation states of the West. …

Getting at the Live Archive: On Access to Information Research in Canada

Most of the draft documents, memoranda, communications, and other textual materials amassed by government agencies do not become public record unless efforts are taken to obtain their release. One mechanism for doing so is “access to information” (ATI) or “freedom of information” (FOI) law. Individuals and organizations in Canada have a quasi-constitutional right to request information from federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government. A layer of bureaucracy has been created to handle these requests and manage the disclosure of information, with many organizations having special divisions, coordinators, and associated personnel for this purpose. The vast majority of public organizations are subject to the federal Access to Information Act (ATIA) or the provincial and municipal equivalents.We have been using ATI requests to get at spectrum of internal government texts. At one end of the spectrum, we are seeking what Gary Marx calls “dirty data” produced by policing, national security, and intelligence agencies. Dirty data represent “information which [are] kept secret and whose revelation would be discrediting or costly in terms of various types of sanctioning.” This material can take the form of the quintessential “smoking gun” document, or, more often, a seemingly innocuous trail of records that, upon analysis, can be illuminating. Dirty data are often kept from the public record. At the other end of the disclosure spectrum are those front-stage texts that represent “official discourse,” which are carefully crafted and released to the public according to government messaging campaigns.

Devolution Dynamics of Spanish Local Government

Over the last few years, there has been a devolutionary tendency in many developed and developing countries. In this paper we propose a methodology to decompose whether the benefits in terms of efficiency derived from transfers of powers from higher to municipal levels of government (the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution) might increase over time. This methodology is based on linear programming approaches for efficiency measurement. We provide an application to Spanish municipalities, which have had to adapt to the European Stability and Growth Pact as well as to domestic regulation seeking local governments' balanced budget. Results indicate that efficiency gains from enhanced decentralization have increased over time. However, the ways in which these gains accrue differ across municipalities—in some cases technical change is the main component, whereas in others catching up dominates.

The short life of the Government Public Relations Association in the US, 1949–1958

The historical literature on US public relations has paid modest attention to the professionalization of the practice in the public sector. This is an historical summary of the Government Public Relations Association, which existed between 1949 and 1958. It attempted to organize a professional association of, largely, public relations officers at the municipal level of government. Its failure to become institutionalized likely reflects the tenuous status of the overt practice of public relations in the US public sector.

Housing, income support and mental health: Points of disconnection

There exists a disconnection between evolving policies in the policy arenas of mental health, housing, and income support in Canada. One of the complexities associated with analysing the intersection of these policies is that federal, provincial, and municipal level policies are involved. Canada is one of the few developed countries without a national mental health policy and because of the federal policy reforms of the 1970s, the provincial governments now oversee the process of deinstitutionalization from the hospital to the community level. During this same period the availability of affordable housing has decreased as responsibility for social housing has been transfered from the federal government to the provincial and/or municipal levels of government. Canada also stands alone in terms of being a developed nation without national housing policy instead what is considered "affordable" housing is partially dependant upon individuals' personal economic resources. As well, over the past decade rates of income supports have also been reduced. Psychiatric survivors have long been identified as being at risk for homelessness, with the disconnection existing between housing, income and mental health policies and the lack of a national policy in any of these policies areas further contributing to this risk.

U.S. Cities and Homeland Security: Examining the Role of Financial Conditions and Administrative Capacity in Municipal Preparedness Efforts

In this paper we address a question fundamental to understanding the potential effectiveness of homeland security policy across the U.S. federal system: what explains homeland security preparedness efforts at the municipal government level? Using data gathered from a nationwide survey of municipal officials, we examine the effects of city governments’ financial and administrative resources, along with measures of broader policy context, on several attitudinal and behavioral indicators of homeland security preparedness. We find that administrative resources have consistent and relatively robust explanatory power and we lay out several policy implications from the analyses presented.

Law in the Labor Movement's Challenge to Wal-Mart: A Case Study of the Inglewood Site Fight

This Article studies the role of law in the successful community-labor challenge to Wal-Mart's first proposed Los Angeles-area Supercenter in the working-class city of Inglewood. It focuses on the use of legal and legislative challenges to mobilize opposition to Wal-Mart's Inglewood initiative - a technique known as the because of its focus on blocking Wal-Mart at a specific location. The aims of this Article are twofold. First, it seeks to understand the site fight in relation to broader shifts within the labor movement, which have driven some unions to promote pro-labor legal reform at the municipal government level. Part I therefore explores how labor leaders have responded to the limits of traditional unionism by pursuing an alternative model of labor activism that uses political opportunities available in the local development process to advocate policy reforms designed to increase union density. This local approach is built upon three pillars: (1) it targets non-exportable service industries tethered to local economies and thus offering strong opportunities for union organizing; (2) it relies on community-labor coalitions to exert political influence within the local development process; and (3) it leverages local opportunities for legal advocacy outside the traditional confines of labor law to promote development practices accountable to labor and community stakeholders. To illustrate the dynamics of local labor activism, Part II provides a detailed case study of the defining campaign of the anti-Wal-Mart movement - the Inglewood site fight - in which labor leaders allied with land use and environmental lawyers to oppose Supercenter plans on the ground that the negative community impacts outweighed consumer benefits. The second goal of this Article is to use the Inglewood site fight to engage the scholarly debate about the role of law in social change processes generally and the relationship between law and contemporary labor organizing specifically. Part III draws four central lessons from the Inglewood campaign. First, in contrast to portraits of lawyers derailing social movements by pursuing rights in court at the cost of grassroots mobilization, the Inglewood case study provides an example of multi-level legal activism where lawyers worked in different institutional venues to challenge Wal-Mart site proposals and develop policy reforms. Second, the Inglewood site fight highlights a flexible advocacy model characterized by tactical pluralism, in which lawyers advanced a coordinated labor campaign using traditional litigation alongside nontraditional skills such as drafting legislation and conducting public relations. Third, the case study reveals the sophisticated ways in which labor client groups operate as consumers of legal services, assembling lawyer teams that contribute networked expertise in such areas as land use, environmental, and election law to advance labor organizing objectives. Finally, the case study provides an interesting perspective on the problem of multi-tiered accountability that arises in the context of low-income community representation, where lawyers must navigate complex relationships with multi-organizational coalitions that, in turn, struggle to represent competing conceptions of community.

Hunter Self-monitoring by the Isoseño-Guaraní in the Bolivian Chaco

Declared in 1995, the 34,400 km 2 Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park is the first protected area in South America co-managed by an indigenous organization, the Capitania del Alto y Bajo Isoso (CABI). In 1997, based on historical occupation by the Isoseno-Guaraniover the past 300 years, CABI formally demanded a 19,000 km 2 'Tierra Comunitaria de Origen' (TCO) that adjoins, but does not overlap, the national park. The creation of TCOs and the co-administration of protected areas are elements of decentralization processes in Bolivia, whereby the management of land and natural resources is devolving to departmental and municipal levels of government. This paper examines biodiversity monitoring in the context of a community wildlife management program developed with CABI. Hunter self-monitoring (100-150 hunters per month) combined with monthly activity records for potential hunters (7637 observed hunter-months) permit esti- mations of total offtakes of subsistence game species for 1996-2003, as well as catch-per-unit-effort over the same time period. These data show considerable fluctuations from year to year and no declining trends that would suggest over-hunting. Monitoring populations of multiple game species can be relatively expensive, even with the voluntary support of hunters, considering data collection and analysis, as well as presentation and discussion through community meetings. At the same time, monitoring does not provide highly accurate assessments of short-term changes in wildlife resources. However, relatively simple participatory methods are important for generating infor- mation on long-term trends and for creating a context for community discussion of formal wildlife management.

Do Public‐Sector Strike Bans Really Prevent Conflict?

This article examines the effectiveness of strike‐ban laws in reducing industrial conflict at the municipal level of government. Our central findings are that job actions were higher in states that had no law or no finality in the law, publicity campaigns were used as a pressure tactic in the bargaining process, and grievance delays were greatest under final offer arbitration. Thus dispute costs are highest in jurisdictions that provide no finality in dispute resolution whether or not an explicit framework for bargaining exists.

Cultural Rights and Civic Virtue

This paper addresses the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local community and the advancement of common civic enterprises. Many political liberals argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various sub groups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The “right to cultural difference” is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality. Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, community and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists argued that common projects, shared norms and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice. These two policy goals therefore may at times be in conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and sub group identification of some minority groups. The paper argues that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle tradeoffs that these conflicts often entail.