- Michiel S de Vries, Chair of the department of Public Administration, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, m.devries@fm.ru.nl

- Daniel Klimovský, Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Arts, Department of Political Science, daniel.klimovsky@gmail.com

- Tim Jäkel, National Research University Higher School of Economics: School of Public Administration, Russia, tjekel@hse.ru

The NISPAcee Working Group 1 on Local Governance deals with all sub-national levels of governance from several points of view: regulation, structure, organisation, functioning, finance, representation, election, public policies etc. The WG especially welcomes empirical research results, comparative analysis, theoretical contributions and, of course, interdisciplinary approaches are also supported.
The NISPAcee Working Group 1 invites papers dealing with topics such as:
- Local democracy, the role of councils, new forms of participation;
- New horizontal linkages between local governments and state agencies in public service delivery;
- Size, scales, capacities, cooperation of municipalities;
- New challenges in public policy at local and regional level;
- The context in which local governments have to operate;
- Stakeholders inside the municipality;
- Intergovernmental relations between the local, regional, national and European levels.
As the 2022 NISPAcee-conference has as its main theme "Crises, Vulnerability and Resilience n Public Administration”, we welcome papers which translate this topic to the local level. What impacts do crises such as the pandemic have on the service delivery of and public involvement in local government policies? Does it impact on:
- Vertical inter-governmental relations, i.e. relations between national, mid-level and local governments;
Horizontal inter-governmental relations, i.e. relations between local governments;
- Structural change within local government organisations;
- Legal, economic, and financial issues for local governments linked to local or national policies trying to contain the pandemic;
- The efficiency and/or effectiveness of remote delivery of local services as a result of civil/public servants working from home;
- Local budget cuts and limitation of local service delivery due to shortfalls of revenues and increase of unexpected expenditures.
Thus, although general papers on developments in local government in CEE countries are still welcome, we especially invite theoretical and empirical papers that address the above mentioned issues.
Proposals for papers to be presented at the 2022 NISPAcee conference should include the following:
1. The names of the authors and their affiliation;
2. The research question to be answered in the paper;
3. The way in which the research question is going to be answered;
4. Information about the case(s)/data to be analysed;
5. The relevance of the paper for the working group.
From participants of this working group full paper is required before the conference.
Deadline of full paper submission is 20th of April 2022.
You can find manuscript guidelines on THIS LINK.