The launch of a new Working Group on Local Public Policies is grounded on the awareness of the peculiarities of the local dimension of Public Administration. Concerning the WG focus, one should be familiar with the following: compared to national authorities, local authorities may suffer more from a lack human capital to adequately perform the required tasks; local public policies may be subject to close and intense scrutiny from the side of local communities; local public policies, especially those related to the provision of public services, may entail that neighboring local authorities pool together the management of such services and need to cope with resulting governance issues.

 

Moreover, local authorities may be exposed to conflicts of interest related to the "revolving doors” between political, administrative, managerial, and consulting roles that may especially take place within local social circles. Finally, local public policies may potentially benefit from benchmarking with other most similar local authorities, but often we lack reliable data for understanding and evaluating how well local regulation performs.

In 2014 the WG on Local Public Policies intends to focus on the issue of regulation of local services – e.g. waste, water, transport, local energy networks, public assets, sport facilities, welfare policies – and their delivery in the CEE countries where the transition from the planned economy has set peculiar challenges to the relationship between local governments and markets.

The Working Group intends to promote exchange of information amongst different Countries of the NISPAcee area. Participants are expected to:

• share data and information on the regulatory framework of specific local public services in the NISPAcee area, for comparison amongst the NISPAcee member Countries and with other Countries. Templates developed by the Turin School of Local Regulation are available at http://www.turinschool.eu/lorenet/table/templates for those who wish to use this instrument as a starting point for the analysis;
• identify development patterns in local regulation and the main challenges faced in terms of regulatory framework design and its implementation;
• identify the main weaknesses in terms of information endowment, capacity, expertise, faced by local public administrations and local regulatory agencies;
• explain how the local context (e.g. features of local politics and societal structure) affects the working and performance of local regulation;
• analyze the actors involved in local regulation, the incentives that lead their decisions, their relations in order to outline possible design for reforms.

Besides this specific focus on regulation of local public services, contributions falling within the broader scope of local public policies, and concentrating in particular on future patterns and challenges of local public policies in transition economies are welcome. A comparative perspective amongst different Countries is an asset.

Contributions from different areas of expertise are particularly welcome, and in particular: public administration, economics, public policy, industrial economics, law, sociology.