Why decentralize decision making? English local actors' viewpoints

Abstract

Decentralized decision making has created restructuring from larger to smaller administrative units, but in many places, strays little from existing arrangements. Moves toward decentralization from central government to city‐regions, and in some areas, below city‐region scale to neighborhoods, reflect a mandate for reform. What is the nature and extent of desired reforms? Using an institutionalist lens, homogeneity and heterogeneity in local narratives about possible future reform can be surfaced. This article emphasizes the importance of understanding the role of local actors' narratives in shaping decentralized institutions. This article uses the findings from a Q‐methodology study to identify and interrogate distinctive local viewpoints on attempts to decentralize decision making in England. In a systematic empirical analysis, local actors' narratives were largely in favor of relatively minor modifications to the status quo. The findings question a conflation of decentralization with participation in decision making.

Governance-as-legitimacy: are ecosystems replacing networks?

“…Formal top-down governances become illegitimate, part of an unwelcome backdrop. Instead, we envisage the practice of the self rather than the imitation of central governances found by Richardson, Durose, and Dean (2018). Learned new governances in communities of practice (Nardi 1996;Lave and Wenger 1991) and distributed in dialogue, receive sanction from acceptability in the local occupational culture: governance-as-legitimacy is localized by emotional-cognitive reflection and distributed learning.…”

“…1 Introduction Osborne's (2010) call to investigate novel governances, their hybridity and new forms, continues to evoke responses, including as Richardson, Durose, and Dean (2018) show, increasing evidence of localized and diverse governances. Yet the dominant conceptual instruments for analysing public service governance remain rooted in binary choices (market-hierarchy) and/or network management (Kooiman 2003;Klijn and Koppenjan 2014).…”

Decentralisation and central-local relations: the case of policing and mental health in England

“…Recent scholarship has emphasised on the necessity of institutional resilience among local public services in order to endure austerity (Gardner, 2017;Rex, 2019). To some scholars, the new wave of decentralized decision-making has prompted large and small administrative units to restructure, yet, in many places, the reshuffling of people and resources strays little from existing arrangements (Richardson, Durose and Dean, 2018). Wilson and Game (2011), for example, identified three models that explain these processes of adaptation: power dependence, mostly following Rhodes (1988), principal-agent relations, brought forward, for instance, by Lane (2006), and network governance approaches frequently used by scholars studying macro, meso, and micro levels of policymaking (see, Klijn and Koppenjan, 2016;Bailey and Wood, 2017).…”

Open Policy Making in the UK – to Whom Might Policy Formulation be ‘Opening Up’?

“…However, citizen participation is a complex phenomenon encompassing many different understandings (Dean, 2016; and these are often glossed over. Policy elites have tended towards retaining strong authority over decision making, even where elites may appeciate 'connecting' with ordinary citizens in some ways, such as 'testing' ideas for instrumental purposes of improving organisational learning (Milewa et al, 1999;Rowe and Shepherd, 2002;Parkinson, 2004;Hendricks and Lees-Marshment, 2019;Richardson et al, 2019). That not fitting within certain rules, however -reaffirming dominant agendas, taking place among narrowly constituted publics (Barnes et al, 2003) and inside 'invited spaces' (Cornwall, 2008) often becomes deemed illegitimate (Young, 2002).…”