New thoughts from some of the UK’s leading academics on the future of local government and devolution are published by the New Local Government Network.

Next Steps for Local Democracy: Leadership, accountability and partnership, brings together the reflections of leading thinkers within local government, setting out a range of ideas on future service delivery, leadership, citizen interaction and rebalancing the relationship between central and local government.

Edited by Iain Roxburgh, Chair of NLGN and Senior Associate Fellow at Warwick Business School, the collection aims to inform the debate on future local/central relations in the run up to the publication of the Empowerment White Paper.

Iain Roxburgh writes:

“Will the White Paper represent the shift in central government – and in particular Whitehall – thinking that is needed? Or will it be just a worthy CLG document full of exhortations to local authorities, most of which will already have much more expertise at citizen engagement than central government departments; and devoid of commitments by other government departments – for example Health and the Home Office?

Why have we still got the balance in governance between the centre and the locality, the national and the sub-national, wrong and what are the obstacles to rebalancing it? A more insidious obstacle to devolution has emerged in recent years: a growing parent / child relationship between central and local government. There is a need to challenge the orthodoxies that have become deep-rooted in our thinking about governance in England, including learning from the experiences of Scotland and Wales. With a general election now at least a year away, 2008 should be a year of new ideas and arguments for devolution”.

Other contributions in the collection include:

Peter John, Hallsworth Chair of Governance and Co-Director of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance, expresses the hope that some of the reforms following the Empowerment White Paper may help institutionalise more powerful mechanisms for citizen engagement and lessen the tendency for it to be regarded and dismissed as “a minority sport”. He quotes research that has shown that a five minute conversation can increase voter turnout by seven percentage points and that much of the decline of participation in recent years can be put down to the decline in personal contact with real people in institutions.

Gerry Stoker, Professor of Governance, University of Southampton focuses on the style and quality of leadership needed at local level. He argues for a facilitative style that constitutes a different way of exercising power and influence, which his research demonstrates is more likely to be evident in mayoral authorities.

Sue Maddock, Director of the NSG Whitehall Public Service Innovation Hub, defines the qualities of leadership that encourage public service innovation and the imperatives of local engagement with service users and communities. She also argues that “the lack of respect within Whitehall not only for local government but also for local communities is hampering innovation diffusion across the public sector”.

John Tizard, Director of the Centre for Public Service Partnerships at the University of Birmingham, argues for greater tolerance and celebration of differences area to area arising from local requirements, priorities and preferences and less attention to “post code lottery” complaints.

Helen Sullivan, Professor of Urban Governance at the Cities Research Centre, University of the West of England, emphasises the importance of instruments such as LSPs and LAAs which recognise the complexities of local governance and the inappropriateness of centrally determined “command and control” strategies for addressing them. Sullivan looks at the obstacles to exercising good local judgment and what is needed to foster it – including the explicit acknowledgement by Whitehall that central policy judgments do not necessarily “trump” local judgment where the two conflict.