The role of local governments in the processes of local development (página 2)

On the other hand Political Sciences has been one of the disciplines that has deepen the most in the different approaches of local governments stating three main approaches (Rehren Bargetto, 1992):

• Doctrinal approach or model of local autonomy: it relates local government to democratic theory. It is defined a group of local and autonomous institutions which the members of the community are closely identified with and feel motivated to participate with them. Usually, it is considered that local autonomy and decentralization are equivalent to democracy and a people"s school for political education.

• Public administration approach: it is based on the theory of the organization and on the interorganizative analysis and it is the result of development in terms of public administration.

• Compared policy approach: it considers that local government is not descriptive or normative activity but an structure of government that is related to the general working of the political system, it orientates the analysis to the individual and its orientations towards the community, local political institutions and their role on the local policy taking into account the organic nexus between the other hierarchical levels.

Local government can be defined as: "a kind of political institution whose authority or competence is limited to a territorial portion of the State that is historically rooted. Though the subordination to national government and the different grade of autonomy and discretion it seems to be a practical need in the authoritarian and democratic political systems. (Márquez Cruz (1997:143).

Local government as a political and administrative organization is included in the Constitutional Regime from which it receives its legacy. In this frame it is part of the State and it exercises public power. Consequently, its function is not only administrative but essentially governmental, of definition and execution of territorial social and economic policies at local level. Territoriality characterizes the municipality and defines the spatial limits of its jurisdiction. That is the reason why it is a political, administrative and territorial organization based on local community (Garda, 2006).

The government can be considered as local when it corresponds to territory in which an specific community lives (in geographical terms is a locality), when it responds to a socioeconomic area with certain grade of coherence and internal interconnection (in anthropological and social terms is a community) and it is subordinated to its opposite term which is the State or government (central administration)[2].

Local development requires an active role and an expansive attitude by municipal government and social actors that impulses the potentialities of the endogenous development. The Municipal Government must form a real instance of the local society representation and participation by means of truly participative mechanisms. From the technical point of view, the municipal government must be able to systematize the information about the needs, inquietudes and local resources processing it in order to produce what is traditionally known as Diagnosis of Need and to consolidate the process of decision-making (Institutional Strengthening). Municipal governments should enlarge its field of action by adding the design and execution of the strategies of local development to its traditional functions.

At present it is visualized a real tendency to consider local government as the key piece in the project of a future society[3]The municipalities due to its proximity to the citizens should carry out an efficacious and efficient action by the citizens that legitimizes them in a direct way[4]In the complex scenario of the globalization and restructuration of the ways to govern there emerge some new challenges for local governments such as (Gallicchio, 2004):

• To have mobility with the complexity.

• To govern through connections instead of hierarchies.

• To manage through the influence instead of the exercise of authority.

• To make emphasis on relationships instead of rules.

On the other hand, the policies of local development of the 80"s and the first half of the 90"s are making possible the emergence of new policies in relation to local governments. (Gomá y Blanco, 2002):

• The tendency to integration and transversalization. On one hand the sectarian definition of policies and the segmented and specialized management of services start to coexist clearly with processes of integral formulation and horizontal management of policies. For example, in the field of services to people: the transversal plans as a result of territorial and thematic or people"s collectivity points of view.

• They are getting more important than the departmental and professionalized regicides.

Form different approaches emerge some strategies of global lecture of the locality which make possible the development of multidimensional processes of actuation but are connected by a conducting string, by an axis that is projected on multiple specific fields of local development policy.

Some authors such as the North American David Osborne y Ted Gaebler make reference to a true "global revolution" in the case of the municipalities. "The rise of government with a managerial approach"[5].

In different occidental countries have been implemented a group of reforms in order to transform radically its conceptions and traditional systems of the local administrations. Among the most outstanding examples are included: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Norwegian, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Spain and some other such as United States, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland and Japan[6]

From a critical perspective Préteceille (1989) notices that at present it is established an almost inverse scheme between the Central State and local governments. The state is given a secondary role in relation to economy while the policies of local government reflex the economic development as main objective. This very same logic has been developed in many countries of the Occidental Europe, especially in ward of those who have been able to preserve the central governments upon local powers.

In the Latin American reality local spaces have been stopped during so many years from developing a group of actions within its respective territories due to the strong dependence they have to the federation especially regarding financial resources, but also due to the few faculties they are given. As a result local governments are more than agents; they are simple executors of the decisions that are made higher spheres of government. (Mota Díaz, 2004).

The new paradigm that has emerged in these countries and is aimed to the New Public Management strongly characterized by the incorporation of the empresarial principles and techniques to the public field, especially to the new role of local administrations. According to Freidman, in the analysis of the cases of municipal reforms in these countries covers the following dimensions[7]

• Relations between the different administrative levels, (distribution of power and task between the central and local levels).

• The initiatives called free communes in the Scandinavians countries are very interesting. These are communes to whom the central government has given a special status (through the experimental special clause, by periods of test of models they are free form administrative and juridical norms).

• Relations between administration and citizens (market mechanisms, information, participation and so forth).

• Internal structures (management, organization, personal, financial system and so forth), and redefinitions of the relation between politics and administration.

In these conceptions administrations are intended to be an entity that is able to catalyze, manage and organize the processes, essentially a coordinator, an entity that does not suffer any erosion carrying out and assuming the tasks that must be assuming and carried out by some other actors. As Boisier says, "to find out a catalytic and synergic ability in the local government". The modernization of the municipal administration according to this point of view means to be orientated to the user (client): it is to change from an Administration of Authorities to an Administration of Services. For example: Delft (Netherlands), and especially some municipalities in Scandinavia. (Friedmann y Micco, 1993).

Local governments should tend to go beyond the classic operative roles of the municipal government as much in its old bureaucratic versions as in its recent versions of management. The increasing of the traditional functions is projected in two dimensions: towards the strengthening of local agendas and towards the development of new strategic and qualitative roles in such agendas (Gomá y Blanco, 2002).

A crucial aspect for local governments in the new context is how to identify strategic and prospective actions that might reduce the emergent complexities derived from changing environments and new institutional arrangements and designs of public policies with an impact on local territories. This implies to dimension different ways to management and planning that assume the leading of their own modernizing processes.

It is about to articulate and enhance a local vision of municipal system, this redounds on an important increasing of its own complexity and ability for governance of webs, actors and processes that have an influence in its territories. This governance is the management of the interdependence between the governments and the non governmental actors in order to create or strengthen webs of cooperation for the collective building of the community development. (Haefner, 2007).

The role of promotion of the local government consists mostly of stimulating and orientating people"s energies to the collective wellbeing and civic coexistence. The potential of local governments as agile forms fro the management of what is global, with the cooperation of their national and international tutorial institutions can be improved by means of the participation of their personals, the technological modernization of their management, the increasing of their financial resources and their administrative competences. This implies a deep restructuration of the public administration at all levels. (Mota Díaz, 2004).

The main function of the municipal administration is not necessarily to produces direct services and goods but through diverse redesigned procedures it should create, develop and regulate specific markets that contribute with needed services and goods in conditions of competitions that assure the quality and price. (Osborne y Gaebler, 1992). Here it is also emphasized that people are stimulated by the administration to undertake own initiatives. Local governments at present should play a relational role through the strategic alliances to the economic and social agents of their territories in order to improve the development of such territories as well as people"s living conditions.

The strengthening of local governments is not produces under classic ways to instrument processes of government where it can be distinguished a triple transaction:

• From a strictly physical and hierarchical image of the territory to a new image of space-web with simultaneous elements of connectivity (virtual) and proximity (material).

• From a monopolist conception of government of the cities-localities to a conception of governance of proximity as management of horizontal webs.

• From a specialized vision of the local government to a vision that is entirely inserted in multilevel webs of governance. (Gomá y Blanco, 2002).

Facing the difficulties of the traditional governments the new articulations of governance imply:

• The recognition, the acceptance and the integration of complexity as an intrinsic element to the political system.

• A system of government through the participation of diverse actors in the frame of plural webs.

• A new position of public powers in the processes of governments, the adoption of new roles and the utilization of new instruments.

The concept of the web has turned itself into "the new paradigm for the architecture of the complexity" (Börtzel, 1998). This implies not only the recognition of a plurality of actors but the articulation of these actors to common organizative frames from which it is possible to interchange resources, negotiate priorities and make decisions related to shared public projects. What defines basically a participative web of governance is (Gomá y Blanco, 2002):

• The no existence of a hierarchical centre able to fixate the processes of government in a monopolist way, it means a multirelational structure of the web and the relational determination of processes and results.

• The inter independence. It is the existence of mutual dependences in the multiplicity of the actors in the moment to solve problems, follow objectives and achieve certain results.

• A certain institutionalization in the less structural sense of the term. So, the existence of some interaction, more or less sustained with some level of stability or sustainability.

Challenges for local governments

Though the processes of decentralization that have taken place as much in developed as in developing countries and more extended in Latin America (Meyer–Stamer, 2006), local governments still experimenting a serious lack of human and financial resources for the strategic planning. This approach of local development with an emphasis on strategic planning has important requirements in terms of skills and abilities for planning. It requires large resources in terms of financial capital and human energy fro the diagnosis, development and supervision of the actions aimed to local development.

Local Development Strategies are frail because they hardly achieve the substantive objectives to incorporate in a participative way the relevant actors of the localities. Due to this it is recognized a low ability for the orientation in the making of strategic decisions as much at public, sectarian and municipal level as in the social and productive sectors. Usually it is stated from the municipalities, an ignorance of the strategic guidelines to follow in the formation of their plans for social investment and the generation of the plans for municipal development and to presuppose an important weakness of the decentralized sector to face the present and future social, political and economical contingences. (Haefner, 2007).

Larger quotas of autonomy and transfer of enough resources are needed in order to work properly offering to the citizens the indispensable services and making more dynamic the development. Local government should be able to catch, manage and control their own resources which can come either from the State or the locality. These actor must have certain grade of autonomy that make possible fro them to make their decisions taking into account their competences and resources.

The internal structure of local governments should be more and more horizontal, integrated and participative in order to facilitate the efficient action of their components in the response to the challenges of their local situations. Local governments should act as efficient public servers. For doing so they must have good information, permanent training; implication and conscience needs-potentialities in their demarcations in order to facilitate processes of local development. There should be a policy for the development of municipal human resources as much as antecedent to the creation of initiatives of local development as in their entire implementation. Local governments must have a stable technical structure that is able to provide efficient advising to local design and the process of decision-making.

The full advance of local governments is to achieve positively their competences, make their management transparent and to canalize the active participation of their citizens and private, public and non governmental agents. Local citizens and organizations should participate in local policies and in the administration of public services through some strategies and the control and evaluation of the functions they have in the local community. The modernization of the State implies the apprehension of these new ways to make politics, with renewed ethic, with new systems of job performance accountability to citizens and an enlarged transparence of all the public management.

The main function of local governments is to promote local development in its different spaces. Their actions to achieve this goal should be developed taking into account an integral and historical vision of the territory. In these spaces should come together into an agreement national governments, ministries and companies at different levels, governmental and non governmental institutions and so forth where local governments must play role of integrating and conciliating agent of all efforts in order to achieve an integrated local development. An integrated development means besides that the actions within the development should be supported by a conception that groups the different main elements of developments such as the political, social, economic, cultural and environmental.

The concrete way in which every local government assures the provision of a local government does not depend on rigid principles but constitutes the application of policies, strategies and actions according to its position in the local, provincial, national and international context an the specific way in which it can work for the wellbeing of the citizens through the harmonization between resources and institutions at all levels and the particular way to react to the challenges of the reality.

Local governments must also integrate to the local government all the actors that can be promoters of the development of the local community where it is inscribed the historic-cultural heritage, the natural heritage the physical capital and technological knowledge. Local governments in their vision of local development should articulate the identities to local culture as collective heritage and potential for development where the preservation of these characteristics is crucial. Local governments while using these resources must protect the environment in order to assure the rational use and the benefits fro the present and future generations. The territorial order and the planning are the ideal tools to fulfil these complex tasks.

Local governments are responsible for their actions and they must involve the citizens and actors in the actions related to local development which includes the diagnostic, formulations of actions, implementation, supervision, systematization and job performance accountability to citizens. The strategic plans for local development elaborated and applied in a participative way make possible to mobilize extraordinary local energies and resources promoting in that way dynamic and self supported processes of development.

The local development strategies from local governments must act in function of the elimination of poverty as the main problem that attacks most of the entire Latin American region. So it is required a conception of development that generates permanents processes of increasing of the local productions of goods and services. It is necessary that local governments in Latin America act more and more as agents of the economic development. Local development is a really complex task that requires the commitment and mobilization of all the actors under the scheme of strong private and public alliances with strategic goals and long term agreed commitments. The alliances among economic actors and not for local development should be leaded or stimulated by local governments that act as facilitators to build up the strategic plan and help to negotiate and define the roles of the different agents. The academic institutions can help with initiatives of innovation, creation of new products through actions of extension and technical assistance.

An important task for local government is to support the integration of the processes for the territorial development. The administrative spaces of the municipalities are not isolated and the processes of development usually go beyond the municipal limits. It is necessary that local governments incorporate to their agendas the activities, information and services to support the integration of local policies and to produce positive effects of synergy.

In the 80s was produced a revaluation of local governments. However, in the practice they had to face different obstacles since in most of our Latin American countries the decentralization has not been made with the appropriate resources and tools that allow local governments to develop an efficient management of the local development and intervene in the cities which explain partially the problems of illegalities, disorder, marginality and poverty that have been present in the process of urbanization.

The territorial differences impact directly on the municipal organization, they impact on the ability to generate own resources, the ability to face the administration of public services and programs. In general, the ability to provide solutions to people demands. In that way, local spaces are being permanently irritated by the multiple economic, political, cultural, social and environmental effects that are derived form the processes of internationalization of the economy, new public dynamic and socio demographic policies and so forth. These are factor that make the local governments to think about their evolution since such forces can act indistinctively as opportunities or risks in the territories. (Haefner, 2007).

The need to staff the municipal system with competences in prospective planning is getting more and more evident because in the present scenarios of open economy there is a multiplicity of forces of market. These forces aim their actions to achieve specific short term economic goals that can put seriously at risk the environmental and socio territorial sustainability of the local territories unless it is produced the mediation of processes of negotiation and technical and political articulation that make possible to dimension, forecast and regulate the potential impacts of such forces.

It is required a municipal system that incorporates to its process of decision-making the urgency to count on competences that make this system be the author of its own local development instead of acting reactively to the tendencies and actors that act in the territories.

As long in developed countries as in Latin America to achieve an articulation of the different actors in order to plan the local development with a prospective approach presents complex aspects. It is always conditioned by the situations, particular interests, electoral analysis, bureaucracy, lack of vision, inflexibilities in the organization and resources, but most of all it requires to have a proactive leadership and animation that make possible the emergence of initiatives and its inclusion in strategic objectives and to motivate people to participate in the process of social conception of the territory.

To advance to the ideal local governments also requires competences in prospective planning with a prospective approach. It is an organized, creative and systematic, committed and systemic search in order to change the future of the local territory. To plan prospectively the territory implies to formulate scenarios and determine the objectives, goals, strategies and priorities, to assign resources, responsibilities and periods of time for the actions, to coordinate efforts and evaluate the stages and results and to assure the control of the processes.

Besides that, to plan prospectively presupposes the ability to select among different alternatives the one that is more suitable for the planned and possible futures not only fro the municipal organization but for the citizenship that is empowered of its own development. It implies to decide at present the actions that will be carried out in the future in order to achieve the objectives that have been previously established. (Miklos, 1993)

To modernize the local governments means to bring them nearer to the community and make them be conscious that to achieve their efficient municipal management means to fit together with the increasing social and cultural complexity of the present societal system.

Local governments present limitations to design efficient mechanisms that make them able to listen (in the sense to process) solutions-increase the spaces-of the civil society and the increasing people"s demands to participate in the making of strategic decisions that are related to their territories and at the same time, to manage appropriately with efficiency and efficacy the services and goods that the community expect from them. (Haefner, 2007).

The present and future challenges that local governments face in a great part of the region are (Mota Díaz, 2004):

• The permanent expansion of the middle and small cities

• The worsening of the environmental problematic.

• The increasing tendency to urban unemployment and poverty due to a serious lack of policies fro sustainable development.

• The weakness of the processes of democratization and decentralization.

• The increasing inequality.

• The aggravation of the social problems of exclusion, inequality in the distribution of incomes, unemployment and social segregation.

As we have already analyzed, the implantation of this process in any country requires a deep institutional transformation aimed to generate a symbiosis between participation and efficiency and to assure at the same time the achievement of the requisite equity (North, 1990). It would be necessary to eliminate the Latin American centralist tradition and to promote a culture of decentralization that implies the culture of self management, management, participation and so forth. However, there is no doubt that the main responsibility in relation to these transformations lies on the political will in these regions, where the states play a determinant role not only in relation to these transformation but in the recognition of the importance of local governments.

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By:

Msc. Addiel Perez Diaz

[1] The emphasis made on economy ignores the importance of the links between local and national level stating that the process of decentralization is an attribute that the different political system have or do not have, instead of consider it as a continuous between poles of centralization and decentralization. Behind a façade of sovereignty or local autonomy could hidden rigid mechanism of central control, especially in the case of Latin American countries where central autonomy and decentralization not always are synonymous of democracy due to a strong centralist tradition in the exercise of the state policy. On the other hand, the structures of power at local level are ignored. It is in this level where the interests of the traditional groups are firmly stated and usually related to political parties at provincial and national level. On the other hand, when it is referred to the necessity of modernization and efficiency (from a technocratic point of view) in the local governmental organizations, this goal of efficiency can be contradictory with the ideal of democratic participation. (González, Villar, 2004).

[2] In Latin America there are about 16 thousand local governments. With the names of Municipality, Alcaldy, Ayuntmiento, Intendancy or Prefecture depending on the country local government have in common that they have a territory, a population with multiple social relations, they constitute a space for development of a unique and particular culture and also have a local government elected by the citizens. Local governments always play the main role on complex and dynamic social systems that must be respected when they generate their own development. (FLACMA, 2002).

[3] Bervejillo, F. Gobierno local en América latina: Casos de Argentina de Argentina, Chile, Brasil y Uruguay En: NNOHLE, D. (Ed): Descentralización Política y Consolidación Democrática, Europa-América del Sur, Síntesis Editorial Nueva Sociedad, Caracas, 1991, Pág. 280.

[4] Friedmann, R y Micco, S. Descubriendo la comuna. Manual de las Ciencias Políticas Comunales, Cuadernos del CED no 18 Santiago, 1993, Pág. 3

[5] Osborne, D y Gaebler, T. Rieventing Goverment €“ How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transformeing the Public sector, Reading, 1992. Tomado de Reinhard Freidman. Hacia el municipios del siglo xxi, Persona y sociedad , Instituto Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Alberto Hurtado, Pág. 133

[6] Ibídem, Pág. 134.

[7] Ibídem, pág. 134