I. Working Group on Local Government
WG Programme Coordinators:
Gabor Soos, Political Science Institute of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
E-mail: [email protected]
Arto Haveri, University of Tampere, School of Management, Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
The 8th year of the Working Group on Local Government focuses on Leadership in Local Government in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
With the increasing demands for more efficiency and democracy in sub-national government, more and more interest is directed towards leadership, particularly the institutional capacity of local leaders. Classically, leadership in local government points to the local leaders’ ability to move local government to a particular course of action, often to persuade others to agree to something they were not necessarily initially predisposed to. Indeed, local leadership today is a complex social phenomenon, and with unclear content and boundaries it is context bound and much more. Leadership can be formal or informal, political or expert, individual or collective; there is community leadership and visionary leadership, etc.
In the Working Group on Local Government, we are attempting to form an extended and more nuanced understanding of local level leadership in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). We are inviting papers dealing with a critical analysis of the institutional, structural and/or attitudinal changes in local government leadership. How are new institutions, structures and practices of leadership evolving, and what does this mean for the practice and theory of local government? We are particularly interested in the role of the leading local government politicians and administrators (i.e. mayors, chairmen, heads of the executive boards, city managers, leading administrators, general secretaries, etc.) and their mutual relations. What is the role of leadership in today’s local government and how is it developing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)?
WG coordinators expect papers in the following categories:
1. Conceptual frameworks which help us to understand leadership at the local level. Papers that explicitly reflect CEE or CIS problems are especially welcome.
2. Empirical papers which analyse leadership institutions, structures and practices at the local level, their argumentation and rationality, experiences and outcomes of leadership practices. Country studies are very suitable for this approach.
3. Comparative papers which highlight the similarities and differences between countries or regions are strongly encouraged.
Beyond this year's theme, one of the panels will be devoted to high-quality papers dealing with topics which are not related to local government leadership, but which contribute to local government studies in CEE and CIS.
The papers to be presented at the workshop in 2015 are expected to contribute both to LG studies and to administrative and other social sciences in general. The coordinators hope to find the opportunity to publish a selected set of contributions.