Municipal Response to Local Diversity: Flexibility in Community Governance

Abstract

The Scandinavian countries have a long tradition for networked or partnership-based policy making at the local level. The tradition involves co-operation between local authorities and market actors as well as actors representing civil society. Despite this long-standing tradition, the emerging diversity and complexity of the co-operative relationships challenge the established systems and structures in these countries as well as in countries where such traditions are less developed. The municipalities have been used to the role as the authority in these relations, an authority that is now destabilised and which led to a situation that calls for flexibility. This paper discusses whether the municipalities possess the flexibility that is often an implicit expectation when entering co-operative relations with the multitude of organisational structures represented in the diversity of Norwegian community councils.

Key Words:

• Local governance, democracy, flexibility

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Democratic Network Governance, Helsing⊘r, Denmark, May 2003. The authors would like to thank Asbj⊘rn R⊘iseland and Nils Aarsæther for comments on earlier drafts of this article. They would also like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve the article.

Notes

1 In an early publication the concept ‘Neighbourhood council’ was used (Aarsæther et al., 2002). This concept did, however, appear confusing to some, because others had used it for local political bodies that to a far larger degree were carrying out municipal service-production (Lowndes & Stoker, 1992). Another reason for the diversion is that the word neighbourhood in a Norwegian context and translation describes a very small location; much smaller than a village or the catchment area of any primary school.