Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Local Government Author(s) Uros Pinteric Faculty of Organisation Studies in Novo mesto Novo mesto Slovenia Uroš Pinterič Title Governance in Slovenian cities between party politics and new wave of management File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Since independence in 1991 in Slovenia there is constant ongoing development of local level governance that is mostly connected to the party politics and elections’ results. However, different cities in Slovenia are facing interesting changes in party power relations that changed development process from minimal consensus and incremental changes to managerial leadership. Despite in many cases, new way of managing cities is connected with different accusations of power usurpation and abuse. Some of such accusation can be certainly understood as fear of political parties form changing local government order form political one to managerial, while others can be proven as truth. Change from political to managerial approach in governing Slovenian cities (or city municipalities) brought better development to these places for sure, but also strongly jeopardized legal predictability in the sense of changing procedures and interests with enough free space for personal interests of those in power. In the paper we will present some of such examples and try to compare their development to similar cities (municipalities) that kept old political way of governing. Main question that will be addressed is, how effective is new way of governing compared to the classical one, and is it only the change in the sense of allowing practical implementation of new public management approach or it is new way of local governance that should be discussed as special phenomena and compared to similar cases in other countries if existing.
