New regionalism in five Swiss metropolitan areas: An assessment of inclusiveness, deliberation and democratic accountability

Abstract

Abstract. Focusing on area‐wide policy coordination in metropolitan areas, this article examines the democratic consequences of the supposed shift ‘from government to governance’. In the first, theoretical, part it draws upon the debate on old and new routes towards regionalism in order to identify four different types of metropolitan governance. It then develops two working hypotheses – an optimistic and a pessimistic one – in order to analyse the implications of various types of metropolitan governance on inclusiveness, modes of decision making and democratic accountability. In the second part, these hypotheses are tested on the basis of comparative case studies on twenty schemes of area‐wide policy coordination in five Swiss metropolitan areas in the fields of water supply, public transport, social services for drug users and cultural amenities. The results suggest that ‘governance’ is superior to ‘government’ in terms of inclusiveness, that it cannot be seen as significantly linked to the fostering of deliberative decision making, and that it can present serious flaws in terms of accountability. It is noted, however, that a shift ‘from government to governance’ does not intrinsically imply democratic drawbacks. Contextual factors play a strong conditioning role.

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“…The conducted case studies, however, do not clearly support either the pessimistic or the optimistic view. The results imply that the question of democracy is probably less dependent on the types of metropolitan governance than on other-not yet identifiedfactors (Kübler and Schwab 2007). 6.…”

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“…2. The distinctions between "the new regionalism" and the earlier public choice and "old regionalism" approaches are well documented elsewhere (see Frisken and Norris 2001;Kubler and Schwab 2007). 3.…”