Urban Governance (original) (raw)
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Geographies of Urban Governance
2015
Urban governance in cities is shaped by, and shapes, global discourses. These discourses shape the discussion of how governance should be organized, what forms it takes, what kinds of governance instruments, methods and data are used and what urban governance practices may look like. Much of this is presented in genderand place/space-neutral, objective language and complex scientifi c jargon, which obfuscates the highly political nature of the shifts in governance and associated governance theories, instruments, methods and practices. It is assumed that these dimensions can be scaled up and down and transferred to different contexts. Close examination reveals, however, that many of these are being used in the service of the most powerful, while the shift from government to (network) governance creates the illusion of empowering all. In practice, accountability, legitimacy, legality and equity are compromised as the most powerful actors infl uence the governance process. In the proce...
Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective
Antipode, 2002
This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future (1999) both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalise that project on a global scale.
Comparative Urban Governance: Uncovering Complex Causalities
Urban Affairs Review, 2005
Unlike most other areas of the social sciences, the study of urban politics has been slow in developing a comparative research agenda. This article explores the potential in comparative urban governance research. Urban regime theory does not travel very well, partly because it is an undertheorized framework and partly because it is in many ways an abstraction of U.S. urban political economy. To escape these obstacles to comparative research, this article argues that regimes should be conceived of as a culturally and historically specific model of urban governance. Comparative urban governance holds tremendous potential in assisting scholars in uncovering causal mechanisms and drivers of political, economic, and social change at the urban level.
Existing dialogue on the transition to good public management in Africa generally are marked by several limitations: a tendency to narrow the thought and practice to the terms and categories of immediate, not very well considered, political and social action, a naïve realism, as it were; ambiguity as to whether civil society is the agent or object of change; a nearly exclusive concern in certain institutional perspectives of ‘development’ and consequent neglect of analysis in terms of generic attributes, specific strategies and performances of these organisations and finally, the inadequate treatment of the role of donors in Africa. Proponents of a strong developmental state in Africa assert that reforms neo-liberal market reforms pushed by IFIs have failed to generate the kind of growth they sought in Africa and hence strong developmental states are the way forward, as they in any way endanger the reforms of good governance and democracy in Africa because only those that were home-grown ever had a chance of success. On the other hand, there exit current schools of thought that “organisational adaptation to political emergencies is part of the Africanisation of public policy. It is an ad hoc process, which defines in outline the emergence of a new system of mal-governance. Rather than societal convergence, the emerging system is adapted to the process of co-evolutionary and separate development that systemic crisis in Africa has given rise to - developmentalism that is hooked to the umbilical cord of international charity and thus the incorporation of aid in national development.
Rethinking Comparative Urban Politics: From Urban Regime Theory to Urban Governance?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
For the past two decades urban regime theory has defined the urban politics agenda in agenda in the United States. Observers outside the US however have noticed that the theory does not provide an analytical framework for comparative urban politics research and that the theory to some degree is an abstraction of the US urban political economy. Instead, there is a growing interest in emerging theories on urban governance as a conceptual vehicle for crossnational research. The paper compares the two theories with regard to their potential as framework for cross-national urban politics research. It looks specifically at how the theories assess the role of inter-governmental relationships, participation in urban politics, and embeddedness in the urban political economy.