Ensuring Sustainable Development of Local Self-Government: Foreign Experience for Ukraine

In order to build effective democratic governance under the Council of Europe Action Plan for Ukraine, local governments and elected representatives must have the knowledge and tools to manage modern and efficient resources, and local governments in general must increase their transparency, activities to strengthen citizens' trust in local political institutions. In its ambitious plans to implement effective governance, the Government of Ukraine is working to create a modern system of local self-government that promotes the dynamic development of regions and transfers as much power as possible to the level closest to citizens - communities. The article is devoted to the issue of ensuring the sustainable development of local self-government in Ukraine on the basis of the experience of building the system of local self-government in the European countries. Foreign experience with the existing system of local governments of Ukraine is compared. Local governments are classified into representative and executive. The practice of organizing their activities is studied. Both regional and local representative bodies and municipalities were studied. Different types of individual and collegial executive bodies of local self-government of foreign countries, methods of their formation, management models are given. The real state of the results of the reform of local self-government and decentralization, as well as the administrative-territorial system in Ukraine has been established. The main positive features of the system of local self-government bodies of foreign countries are identified and options for implementing sustainable development methods for self-government of Ukraine are proposed, including through effective state control, election of key local government officials, codification of local self-government legislation and balancing the status and powers of representatives and executive bodies of local self-government.

“A Factious, Seditious and Unruly Multitude”

As a child in Malmesbury, Thomas Hobbes had an opportunity to observe many of the social and political phenomena that he considered in his later work. Contemporary sources reveal that Hobbes lived in a community that was wracked by marked animosity between different social groups, frequent disorder and a lack of consensus about the legitimacy of local political institutions. There was tension between the town’s elite and a proletariat of impoverished workers. Different members of the elite clashed, sometimes violently, as they competed for local ascendancy. Hobbes’s extended family was heavily involved in these events. His hometown was deeply troubled. It was also a place where people had access to some “political” vocabulary which they used when describing their discontents and conflicts. The possible influence of Hobbes’s early experiences on his intellectual development has attracted little previous attention.

Introduction to the Special Feature on Dynamic Processes of Rebel Governance

Research on conflict processes has recently highlighted the myriad of tactics rebels use which are not violent in nature (cf. Petrova 2019; Ryckman 2020; Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé 2017). Concurrently, rebel governance has drawn increasing attention from scholars and peacebuilding practitioners. In-depth historical studies of rebel groups highlight the activities and behaviors that rebels engage in beyond making war—such as providing social services and building local political institutions (Mampilly 2011; Arjona 2016a; Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015). Complementing these works, studies have sought to provide cross-national examination of trends in these governance behaviors (Huang 2016; Heger and Jung 2017; Stewart 2018). Despite this work, quantitative and formal research in conflict processes often ignores the insights that the rebel governance literature has generated, frequently focusing exclusively on violent tactics or considering governance issues primarily as part of conflict settlement processes. In this special feature, we work to integrate the study of rebel governance with the conflict processes literature, providing a conceptual link between the two while offering novel contributions to advance our understanding of the dynamic processes of rebel governance.

Provincializing Global History

This book explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, the book unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.

Reforming “Petty Politics!”: George Eliot and the Politicization of the Local State

Situating George Eliot within mid-Victorian debates over central versus local government, this article contests the widespread presupposition that Eliot rejected official politics in favor of cultural mediation. Specifically, I argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, “the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working” them. Using the representative protocols of the local press, Eliot portrays Middlemarch's public health institutions as both opaque and transparent. While the public health work of Tertius Lydgate is essential to the novel's bildung plots and the town's cholera response, it is only represented obliquely through narrative paralipsis. In contrast, Eliot stages local council debates theatrically in scenes whose typography mimics the local press's treatment of council meetings. Eliot then supplements these protocols with the realist novel's networked form, which compels readers to supply characterological depth to the elided labors of Lydgate and the dramatic representations of council meetings. In thus depicting local representative government, Eliot prompts a desire for local political institutions and trains her readers in the cognitive skills needed to participate within them.

Role of Community-based Organisations in Promoting Democratic Local Governance at the Grassroots in Bangladesh

Democratic local governance (DLG) is often regarded as a necessary precondition for transforming lives and livelihoods of people living in the rural areas of developing countries. This article tries to answer how community-based organisations (CBOs) shape the way services are delivered by local government agencies in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the article explores how the community’s, especially women’s, demands and interests are being negotiated at local political institutions. In doing so, the research focuses on Union Parishad (UP) as the core institution of the local power structure and Kachukata Gram Unnayan Parishad (GUP) as the case of a women-led CBO. It has been observed that Kachukata GUP has evolved as a full-fledged CBO over the years and currently mobilises marginalised groups to establish their rights and access to various government and non-government organisations. In addition to ensuring gender-responsive governance, GUP is also creating space for participation and developing interactive relationship between the people and power at the grassroots in Bangladesh.

The Ties That Bind: Building Civic Capacity for the Tennessee Achievement School District

The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) is among several state-run districts established to turn around underperforming schools. Like other such districts, the ASD removes schools from local control and is not accountable to local political institutions. Despite its authority, the ASD has encountered opposition within Memphis where its schools reside. For those inclined to its market orientation and suspicious of traditional districts, the ASD is an innovative effort to improve outcomes for disadvantaged students. For those that see educational failure in Memphis as the result of social and economic isolation, the ASD appears motivated by profit, paternalism, and racism. A third narrative, largely hidden from view, encompasses people who reject state takeover but seek to confront structural causes of poor performance.