English local government and the local trap

ABSTRACT

Local government in England faces unprecedented challenges, with ten years of austerity adding to longer-term concerns over its waning influence. Responses so far have involved dismissing local government for more radical alternatives or re-iterating increasingly shaky defences. I argue that resetting the debate around local government requires firstly addressing the meanings we have assigned to the local, which are at presentconstrained by the ‘Local Trap’, and that looking at the English case gives a particularly insightful view of its consequences. I set out the ‘Local Trap’ and identify three ways in which local government discourse is trapped; by assumptions about the ‘naturalness’ of the local; assumptions about its democratic qualities; and an adherence to scaler representations. I then argue that as a consequenceattention is diverted to either local government past or an elusive one to come, before setting out potential pathways out of the trap via engaging more robustly with practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Local trap
• meanings of the local
• local government as practice
• revisiting local government

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Neil Barnett

Neil Barnett is a senior lecturer in public policy at Leeds Beckett University. After a career in local government he became an ESRC management teaching fellow. He has published articles on local government in Political Studies, Local Government Studies and Public Policy and Administration.