How will increasingly diverse cities and counties strengthen their political leadership for the 1990s and beyond? How can mayors and other officials become effective leaders in government structures that deny them executive power and diffuse their political leadership? What kind of leadership will this be and what impact will it have? Facilitative Leadership in Local Government shows how officials can reach beyond the structural limitations of their position and work with the constraints of fragmented power to build strong and effective government. In this book, James H. Svara and expert contributors offer local government officials and those that work with them a guide to a successful new model of leadership--facilitative leadership. The facilitative leader accomplishes objectives by enhancing the efforts of others. Rather than seeking power for themselves, facilitative mayors or chairpersons seek to empower the city council and the city manager by stressing collaboration and collective leadership among all parties so that all can work effectively together.

Providing a critical examination of government in American cities, this volume presents the innovative view that mayors in council-manager cities are better positioned to develop positive leadership than their peers in mayor-council cities. This book develops a deeper understanding of city government institutions with an examination of groundbreaking conceptual model of leadership and how it relates to local government forms. Based on the observation of mayors who have served in the past decade in cities ranging in size from 1500 to 1.5 million, fourteen case studies evaluate factors that contribute to effective leadership and highlight emerging issues faced by today‘s cities.

Local governments throughout the west are undergoing a transformation of their leadership styles and structures. Some countries have abandoned traditional systems of collective or committee based decision-making in favour of Cabinet models or, more radically, a directly-elected executive mayor, while others have strengthened existing mayoral systems. There are a few exceptions to this trend. Based on original research in eleven countries the book assesses these changes in terms of their implications for political accountability, the role of lay politicians, political recruitment, the professionalization of leadership, and relations with the bureaucracy.

Does the performance of your local government leave something to be desired? Maybe youre not satisfied with the services your government provides, or maybe the cost for these services is far too much. If so, take heart; you can do something about it. Steps to Local Government Reform is your step-by-step guide to undertaking reform on the local level. Public manager Allyn O. Lockner combines years of experience in the public sector to show how you, as a resident or an elected local official, can work with others to successfully implement change within your community. Lockner explains how to make numerous choices regarding the preparation for, and the study, planning, marketing, approval, implementation, and evaluation of reforms. He also shows you how to share these reform results with others. Using various criteria, comparisons, practices, analyses, and other studies aimed at local government performance, Lockner delves into the sometimes tricky world of enacting reform. He reveals how local government works and provides a map for maneuvering around bureaucratic roadblocks. In addition, he includes a comprehensive bibliography for research, an appendix of terms commonly used in the reform process, and guides to creating reform models that are likely to work. With this compendium, you can help resolve vital issues, improve your community, and live a better life.

Directly elected mayors are political leaders who are selected directly by citizens and head multi-functional local government authorities. This book examines the contexts, features and debates around this model of leadership, and how in practice political leadership is exercised through it. The book draws on examples from Europe, the US, and Australasia to examine the impacts, practices, and debates of mayoral leadership in different cities and countries. Themes that recur throughout include the formal and informal powers that mayors exercise, their relationships with other actors in governance - both inside municipalities and in broader governance networks - and the advantages and disadvantages of the mayoral model. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to build a picture of views of and on directly elected mayors in different contexts from across the globe. This book will be a valuable resource for those studying or researching public policy, public management, urban studies, politics, law, and planning.

A truly international examination of public sector leadership, this book explores the ways leaders of developed nations are addressing current challenges. The overriding question explored by the authors is how public leadership across the globe addresses new challenges (such as security, financial, demographic), new expectations of leaders, and what public sector leadership means in the new era. The book allows the reader to view a large number of situations across the globe to better understand the relation between context and leadership. It integrates the two fields of leadership and public administration, providing a wide-ranging and complementary empirical context to the topic. Transcending state-centered perspectives, the authors include new developments in governance and public private sector collaboration while retaining a focus on the public values involved. The chapters address public sector leadership issues in a wide array of nations, integrating international perspectives with a globally diverse authorship. Several chapters address issues of collaboration across sectors, changing roles in the New Public Management paradigm, and corresponding new visions of leadership. Several of the chapters are explicitly comparative, including a study of mental health leadership training topics in eight nations, central banking in Europe, and efficiency studies in Britain, Denmark, and Norway. The chapters can be used as thought-provoking case studies as part of a supplemental text, and are accompanied by substantial bibliographies. Scholars, students, and practitioners in leadership, public policy and administration, and organization studies will find this volume a useful reference.

This insightful Research Agenda takes a thematic approach to analysing reform in regional and local government, exploring central concepts such as devolution, Europeanisation and globalisation. Expert contributors address key trends in structural change and reorganisation, subnational autonomy and decentralisation, metropolitan governance, and multi-level governance.