The Price of Losing Autonomy
Amalgamations have gained popularity worldwide as important strategies for enhancing administrative efficiency and addressing a variety of governance challenges, including fiscal constraints, demographic shrinkage, and fragmented urban governance. This trend has also spurred a surge in empirical research to assess the actual impacts of such territorial reforms across diverse political and social contexts. One noticeable pattern that emerges from the literature is that small and politically marginalized units are often underserved after amalgamations, as a result of their diminished political importance in the post-amalgamated jurisdictions.
Innovating Methodologies for Examining Gentrification-Induced Social and Cultural Displacement
Community stakeholders have sought to mitigate the impacts of gentrification, particularly among communities of color. Community-engaged, action-oriented research holds promise for developing interventions. Specifically, this research approach helps to center the voices of those most impacted and ensures community-informed solutions. In the same vein, the complex impacts of gentrification on space and place call for innovative research that highlights these dynamics. Such innovative research has the potential to further inform community and policy level interventions.
What is the future of survey-based data collection for local government research?
Local governments are “where the rubber meets the road” for many policies, which makes them an important foci for the study of policy adoption, diffusion, implementation, and management. However, the data needed to examine them in a manner that enables generalizable results can be hard to come by. As a result, researchers often have to collect their own data about municipal priorities, policies, and decision-making via survey efforts targeting local government officials.
The Role of Women in Local Governments
In recent years, the reduction of available resources, increased debt and the decentralisation of services have placed many governments in precarious situations. If we focus on the local public sector, municipalities are increasingly challenged to present balanced budgets without raising taxes or reducing vital services for their citizens. Thus, it is essential for local governments (LGs) to provide their services in the most efficient way, which would allow them to provide more services with fewer resources or the same services at a lower cost. The term “efficiency” refers to the level of performance of an organization (Farrell 1957). It represents the level of output that can be obtained by a level of input, in comparison with the optimal combination input-output.
Does Inter-municipal Cooperation Really Reduce Delivery Costs?
Growing skepticism expressed by local governments towards private-sector participation in public service provision has led many local authorities to experiment with new forms of public service delivery. In recent decades, one of the alternatives most frequently adopted has been inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). IMC is seen as a tool that can lower costs by exploiting economies of scale, while maintaining greater government control over production, something that is not readily achievable with privatization. Further benefits of IMCs include the enhanced cross-jurisdictional coordination, service quality and inter-municipal reciprocity. Concerns over stability, equity and universality may also stimulate cooperation.
Dealing with Missing Data
In our UAR article, we seek to raise awareness about how to treat missing data in urban studies research. A large proportion of the empirical research on urban politics and policy relies on data collected through surveys of local government or community organization leaders. Surveys provide a relatively efficient way to collect large amounts of consistently measured individual or organizational information needed to conduct comprehensive and accurate statistical analysis. This is particularly important if the aim of research is to produce generalizable findings and contribute to understanding a particular phenomenon by testing theory.