Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG1: Local Government Author(s) Tibor Laszlo Busko Ludovika University of Public Service Budapest Hungary Title Local Public Service Management in Contemporary Hungary - From a Local Government Point of View File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Tibor Laszlo Busko Abstract The Section 2, paragraph 2 of the Act CLXXXIX. of 2011 on Hungarian Local Governments declares that ‘local governance expresses as well as represents the local public will in a democratic manner, creating publicity in the local public affairs’. The local public affairs are in a large extent associated with the citizens’ supply of local public services. Thus, local public service management should be interpreted as an essential part of the ‘good local governance’. However, since the right wing coalition led by the FIDESZ Party came to power in 2010, the role and competences of the Hungarian local governments, not independently of the emergence of the ‘New Weberian State’ throughout the world after the 2008 global financial crisis, has been significantly rearranged. Apart from anything else, a lot of mandatory and/or voluntary self-government functions and competences provided previously at local level (for example, the whole local public education system and so on) has been detracted by the State. This is because it seems necessary to scrutinize the Hungarian local governments’ contribution to the local public service system under these changing circumstances. The paper will be divided into two main parts. The first part of the paper tries to systematize the local governments’ role in ensuring local public services in an adequate and sustainable manner, in accordance with the customers’ expectations, too. The systematization will be done in the light of (a) the degree of the influence of local governments on the local public services, and (b) the efficient operation of the local public services in question. a) As for the degree of the influence of local governments on the local public services, we aim at distinguishing – in relation to the so-called ‘mandatory’ and/or the ‘voluntary’ local government tasks – (a1) the direct exercise of functions, (a2) a wide range of delegated forms of the exercise of functions and, mainly in the context of the local public services which has been recentralized after 2010, (a3) the exercising an informal influence. b) Apart from the degree of the influence of local governments on the local public services, we will argue for the hypothesis that the local governments’ resilience (otherwise: the adaptive capability to changing circumstances) has a huge positive impact on the efficient operation of all local public services. On that basis, the main thesis of the paper is that local governments’ role in ensuring a local public service can be relatively clearly identifiable if we integrate the local public service into the context of (a) and (b) points. In order to verify our main thesis, the second part of the paper tries to present a few examples from the area of the contemporary Hungarian local public service management. Adaptation strategies to the external situation (especially: to the regulatory environment) and the sustainable exploitation of local governments’ own resources will be treated as focal points of this empirical examination. By means of those examples/specific strategies, we will be hopefully able to justify the importance of local governments in an era in which the opportunities for their enforcement of interest in the field of local public service management seems deeply problematic.
