Public service providers and elected levels of government around the world are continually being encouraged to involve citizens in decision‐making. Various means of achieving this have been employed by local authorities in different countries. These include local referenda, customer surveys, online discussion forums and citizens’ juries. This article draws on the example of new participative committee structures within Irish local government. These seek to involve identified stakeholders (including business, trade unions, the community/voluntary sector and environmental interests) in local government decision‐making. These structures were inspired both by international trends towards participatory democracy and Ireland's experience of neo‐corporatist ‘social partnership’ at the national level. This article considers the new committee structures and their composition and examines some of the problems encountered. It demonstrates that recent research into these new structures supports many of the concerns that have been raised in the literature on varying participative mechanisms practiced in other countries.
Theories of interest intermediation in the European Union (EU) increasingly emphasize how domestic embeddedness influences the strategies of domestic interest groups. This article investigates a number of hypotheses advanced in this area empirically, based on analysis of the mobilization of local government interests in Denmark, Ireland and the Britain in relation to EU environmental directives. Interest groups that have a weak influence over national governments may be tempted into a 'by-pass' strategy, while interests that have a privileged position in domestic policy networks may be initially reluctant to embark on EU-level strategies. However, such strategies are not static but rather evolve and change over time -there is evidence of policy learning and a trend towards 'venue shopping' at both national and EU levels. On the other hand, those interests that remain weak at national level may also remain weak at European level.
Reform of local government in Ireland has tended to involve both reform initiatives that mirror broader trends in public service reform nationally, as well as reform initiatives that are distinctive to the local government sector. Amongst the former we can include managerial reforms, digitisation and efforts to make local government more open and accountable. Other initiatives have included changes to the service portfolio of local government, pointing to an enhanced role in some fields and a reduced role in others. Some reforms can be characterised as enduring – in that they have been recurring themes in successive reform programmes. Other reform themes have been somewhat more occasional or sporadic and arguably brought about by the specific circumstances in which they were implemented. Looking to the future, we might speculate that upcoming challenges may include how public services generally can cope with diversity in addressing challenges that are likely to vary in different parts of Ireland, for example, based on distinctions between urban, suburban and rural areas. The article appeals for a more evidence-based approach to reform in the local government sector – this should be aided by existing research contributions and the enhanced evaluation capacity that exists in the Irish public service.
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