I. Working Group on Local Government | NISPAcee Information Portal

Topic 2011:
From the Past to the Future: How does history matter for the development of local governments in CEE?

1. Call for Papers – for the 19th NISPAcee Annual Conference (Varna)
The fourth year of the Working Group on Local Government focuses on the relevance of history for the future of local governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Gabor Soos, Political Science Institute of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

Arto Haveri, Local Government Studies, University of Tampere, Faculty of Economics and Administration, Finland

The general aim of the workshops in Varna is to explore how past developments influence the decisions and opportunities of local governments. The papers are expected to be explicit and explain the often implicitly used arguments on the the effect of the past, e.g.

· difficulties (or impossibility) of reforms explained by self-reinforcing institutions, inertia or path dependence;

· course of events explained by political culture (stable and difficult-to-change expectations of citizens or politicians);

· long-lasting effect or diverging outcomes explained by formative events;

· long-lasting special characteristics of cities or regions explained by economic or social structures created by spontaneous developments or government policies in the past.

Every paper presented in the workshop should explicitly focus on those causal mechanisms of the past, which influence the present or may shape the future of local administration.

The coordinators are especially interested in the shadows of the communist past. Papers with the following research questions are invited:

· How and to what degree the consequences of events, policies or institutional changes still affect local politics and administration in a local government or in the local government system?

· Do former communist countries form a bloc yet? Do local administrations bear similar characteristics which can be explained by the common model of communism (at least in certain groups of countries such as Central Asia, the Baltic States or Central Europe)?

· What is more important for local administration: historical paths or present-day pressures? (For instance, political culture versus EU-conditionality.)

The coordinators strongly prefer analytical papers, showing the causal mechanisms that link the past to the present and future in a systematic manner, to simple descriptive papers. The accepted paper proposals should go beyond the mere presentation of historical events and belong to one of the following:

· theoretical papers on the possible impact of history;

· methodological papers on how to study the causal mechanisms related to the effect of the past;

· empirical papers on actual developments.

Coordinators give priority to papers that are written in a well-structured manner.

The papers are solicited at all levels of analysis:

· cross-country comparisons of local government systems;

· within-country developments of local government systems;

· comparative city studies;

· city/village stories.

The papers presented at the Varna conference are expected to contribute both to LG studies and to administrative and other social sciences in general. The coordinators hope to get obtain funds to publish the findings.

2. The Working Group on Local Government
The Working Group on Local Government of NISPAcee was established in 2008. The Working Group invites researchers and practitioners to take part in a project aimed at exploring the reforms of, and at, the local government level in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The theme of the working group is local government. By using the term local government we prefer the broader context of governance than only the internal machinery of local administration. The core of the mission of the working group is built around the comparative analysis of local government developments in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) area. The developments are also compared with the European and Anglo-Saxon local administration models, as well as with the theories of self governance and decentralization.

The Working Group especially focuses on local government reforms. Members are expected to compare the challenges CEE countries face, identify the trends and waves of changes, and draw conclusions about convergence and divergence within CEE and between the CEE countries and the rest of Europe. The reforms examined by the group include both large-scale structural changes of public administration and small-scale managerial reforms initiated by local decision-makers. Contributions are encouraged especially in the following topics:

- multi-level governance (different solutions in use in various European countries in the division of work between the layers of administrative machinery, relationships between sub-national levels, the consequences of regional reforms);

- local network governance (the usefulness of this fashionable term in CEE countries, forms of cooperation with other administrative agencies, business and important civil society groups);

- e-governance and e-democracy (possibilities, problems and expenditures, especially according to the needs of the CEE countries);

- metropolitan governance (the consequences of the rapid suburbanization process of the 1990s, the need for urban administrative development, the challenge of the capital city).

All these areas of the research fields can be analysed by using political, administrative, cultural and economic views.

The first meeting of the Working Group in Bratislava (2008) collected various papers on local governments in CEE and the CIS. The second, in Budva (2009) had a more specific focus on city-regions. A volume was published with 10 papers and presented at the conference. The third meeting in Warsaw (2010) provided an opportunity to discuss the impact of the global economic crisis on local government.

3.Working Group Directors and Members
Gabor Soos, Political Science Institute of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. He holds a PhD in Political Science, MA in Sociology, and MA in History. He edited and co-edited three books on local government in Central and Eastern Europe.
Arto Haveri is a Professor of Local Government Studies at the department of Regional Studies, University of Tampere. He focuses primarily on local governance and local government management, and most recently on promises and problems of democratic network governance. He also maintains an interest in problems of administrative reform design and evaluation, particularly in areas of local and regional government and regional development.

Potential working group members will come from both academic institutions working in local administrative science and from practitioners who are involved in development of local administrations in the CEE and the CIS countries.