Governing Ambiguities. New Forms of Local Governance and Civil Society "Governing ambiguities: dynamics, institutions, actors

It is generally accepted that the role of local government is changing. Over the last decade most European countries have reformed local governments: the competences and powers of local authorities, and relations between centre and region, have been considerably modified in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere, thus favouring a process of decentralization (John, 2001). The implementation of the European Union's structural funds has also been an important driver of change in local operations, introducing partnership working and thus opening up policy processes to a wider range of local actors. Local service delivery and funding have been widely restructured; the private and the voluntary sectors have become actively involved, with the aim of increasing efficiency and responsiveness to local needs. Furthermore, the need to renew local democracy has led to a search for new ways of including citizens and citizen organizations in local policy-making and politics, thus initiating a period of intense democratic experimentalism (Cohen and Sabel, 1997; Smith, 2007). Research shows that in the Netherlands, Britain and France a majority of municipalities have experimented with participatory forms of governance (Blondiaux and Sintomer, 2002). In the UK local authorities start an average of nine initiatives for public participation and consultation a year, and employ a wide range of participatory devices to involve citizens in public life, from traditional forms of consultation to more innovative devices inspired by the deliberative ideal (Lowndes, Prachett et al., 2001). In Germany the tradition of ‘Plannungzelle' is now a well-established practice and in Italy similar devices are employed in local planning (Bobbio, 2000). Innovations for public participation vary, though it is of note that forms of partnership working, participatory budgeting and some deliberative devices like citizens' juries and consensus conferences appear to be operating in almost all European countries. Such changes in policy and politics have often been summarized as a shift ‘from government to governance'. This expression has been widely used to describe transformations at the national level but - as the above examples show - it also characterises local public dynamics. Civil society associations and business organisations are increasingly involved in local government (Stoker, 2004), which has developed network-based forms of coordination. 2 This book contributes to the on-going debate: how can we understand the dynamics, actors and institutions in changing patterns of local governance? To what extent does the paradigm of network governance - identifying a transition from hierarchy to networks - reflect what is actually going on at the local level? Does this paradigm encompass the institutional complexity of local governance practices? In the rest of this introduction we discuss how the academic literature addresses changes in local governance, assessing multiple understandings of governance and their implications. We focus on the emergence of networked governance and discuss it critically, highlighting how governance arrangements imply a number of ambiguities that cannot be understood by reference only to network activities. Our main thesis is that changes in local governance entail, rather than a clear cut transition from vertical coordination to horizontal coordination, a complex set of institutions, coordination mechanisms and institutionalized practices that mix vertical and horizontal coordination, thus generating ambiguities.