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Managing Local Government: An Essential Guide for Municipal and County Managers offers a practical introduction to the changing structure, forms, and functions of local governments. Taking a metropolitan management perspective, authors Kimberly Nelson and Carl W. Stenberg explain U.S. local government within historical context and provide strategies for effective local government management and problem solving. Real-life scenarios and contemporary issues illustrate the organization and networks of local governments; the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of city and county managers; and the dynamics of the intergovernmental system. Case studies and discussion questions in each chapter encourage critical analysis of the challenges of collaborative governance. Unlike other books on the market, this text’s combined approach of theory and practice encourages students to enter municipal and county management careers and equips them with tools to be successful from day one.
Local governments encounter many problems, and although there is not one panacea that works internationally, this book argues that there are mechanisms to improve local situations. By drawing on case studies from the developing world, the authors review best practices in good governance.
This report discusses the findings from a mail survey of local government economic development activities that was sent to all 540 municipalities and 100 counties in North Carolina. An important part of the analysis examines whether cities and counties differ significantly in their economic development efforts and whether smaller jurisdictions employ different types of development strategies and tools than larger ones. The survey findings also highlight the barriers that local governments face in promoting economic development and identify important technical assistance needs and gaps in local capacity.
After working for nearly three years to improve the performance of the government of Flint, Michigan—and discovering that there was no comprehensive work on the subject of local-government management to refer to—Brian Rapp and Frank M. Patitucci felt a personal as well as a professional need to write a book that would help them understand their successes and failures, and that would help others do a better job in similar situations. The result, this book, is unique both in its approach and in its presentation. The authors, establishing a conceptual framework within which to understand their subject, use Flint as a case city to examine the practical impact of factors affecting city government, and they indicate the major standards and criteria that should be applied in evaluating that impact. Although they recognize that within each city there are unique conditions that make a blanket prescription impossible, the authors are nevertheless convinced that many individuals both in and out of government can do something to improve the performance of their city government, and they have set out to help these individuals understand, in the most concrete terms possible, how they might go about it.
More than a century ago, John Dewey challenged the education community to look to civic involvement for the betterment of both community and campus. Today, the challenge remains. In his landmark book, editor Thomas Ehrlich has collected essays from national leaders who have focused on civic responsibility and higher education. Imparting both philosophy and working examples, Ehrlich provides the inspiration for innovative new programs in this essential area of learning.
Managing Local Government Services, 3rd ed. is a comprehensive text on the subject of local government services relevant to local governments of all sizes. This edition is refocused and updated to include the demographic, economic, technology and cultural trends that affect the management of service delivery. New chapters discuss the shift from ¿government¿ to ¿governance,¿ alternative methods of service delivery, community development, and the five management practices that are fast becoming the standard for professional local government management.Each chapter lays out the manager¿s responsibilities in each service area, and provides effective policies, practices, and procedures. Short case examples give you a practical look at the goals, challenges, and solutions in the manager¿s world.
This book provides a new institutional economics perspective on alternative models of local governance, offering a comprehensive view of local government organization and finance in the developing world. The experiences of ten developing/transition economies are reviewed to draw lessons of general interest in strengthening responsive, responsible, and accountable local governance. The book is written in simple user friendly language to facilitate a wider readership by policy makers and practitioners in addition to students and scholars of public finance, economics and politics.
This book is about citizen participation and its effects on local planning and local accountability, showing how participation can improve local government performance. It addresses the rhetoric of citizen participation and its negative effects such as discrimination, exclusions, elite captures, clientelism, and shallow participation. Applying mixed-methods of analysis, the book argues that local government performance depends substantially on circumstances, especially the degree of citizen participation, level of socioeconomic development, and the achieved state of social mobilization. As participation takes place in diverse socioeconomic and cultural settings, merely reforming institutions to make participation more inclusive and democratic alone is not sufficient.