Public sector restructuring and regional development: the impact of compulsory competitive tendering in the UK

This paper contributes to the analysis of contemporary public sector restructuring in the UK through an evaluation of the impact of the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) for the provision of local public services. Public services play an important stabilizing role in regional economic development but the introduction of CCT has undermined that role. Public service workers have suVered deteriorating levels of pay and conditions of service, and the capacity of local authorities to act to support local economic development has been reduced. Thus the introduction of CCT has undermined the contribution of local public services to the maintenance of interregional economic stability and to regional development

Sustainable development indicators and local government

As the level of goverrument closest to the people, local authorities have been credited with a key role in action towards sustainable development (United Nations, 1992). This thesis describes research which addresses mechanisms for evaluating sustainable development practice by local govemment. A review of approaches to measuring progress, in economic, social and environmental terms, identified sustainable development indicators as an evaluation framework whose applicability to local government warrented further research. A review of research literature highlighted the need for a dynamic and cyclical research approach which would acknowledge the contested and valueladen nature of both sustainable development and the research endeavour. The fieldwork is written up in three stages. The first stage explores the scope for transferring experience from public sector quality and performance indicators work. The second stage is a thin and linear description of the process of Fife Regional Council's role as a pilot authority in a Local Government Board Sustainability Indicators project. The third stage uses the wide range of written and experiential data gathered through the role of Project Consultant/Researcher to the Fife project to present a rich description of 'Sustainability Indicators for Fife'. The dialectic and hermeneutic framework adapted for this study enabled a detailed examination of the iterative movement between the sustainable development framing of the whole report and the process of crafting individual indicators. The study concludes that sustainable development indicators have considerable value as a performance management tool for use in local government, particularly in the context of the Local Agenda 21 and Community Planning initiatives. However, it is the quality and approach to local governance that will have an overiding impact on the achievement of effective action towards sustainable development. Recommendations are made for good practice and for further research

The Interrelationship of Planning, Participation and ICT: the Case of Developing a Curriculum in Agia Varvara, Athens, Greece

One of the main problems in recent urban planning is how to make more practical very broad and commonly used theoretical, and interrelated, principles such as sustainability and governance. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate how one of the main issues of urban governance, i.e. public participation in planning, can be helped through the use of new technologies. The data are provided by the PICT (Planning Inclusion of Clients through e-training) project which was a three-year (2002-5) pilot project co-funded by the Leonardo da Vinci Programme of the European Commission. The main aim of the project was to encourage and facilitate effective public participation in planning by providing the necessary skills to planners and the public to communicate with each other and by developing the appropriate tools that would make such communication meaningful. The project addresses all participants in the planning process, the key objectives being to introduce key IT skills, fight technophobia and disbelief, improve communication skills, acquire an understanding of the built environment and spatial representations, and finally introduce game like activities to implement VR support tools. The PICT partners came from the UK, Greece, Belgium and Hungary. The Project Contractor was Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council (UK) and the Project Coordinator was PRISMA Centre for Development Studies (Greece). The paper focuses on the curriculum developed for the Municipality of Agia Varvara which lies to the west of the City of Athens. It has a population of approximately 30,500 people with a multicultural identity and high unemployment rates. The developed curriculum consists of three parts: a ‘core’ part that is shared by both planners and the public, and two distinct parts: one addressing the public and the other the planners. Each part consists of several modules, to cater for different learning levels, abilities and interests. The structure is flexible and the whole idea was to have a curriculum with a scientific, and not a ‘journalistic’, basis that could, at the same time, be simple, but not simplistic.

The Impact of the Law on Industrial Disputes in the 1980s: Report of a Survey of Education Authorities

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project designed to investigate the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of industrial relations and the processes by which this has come about. Interviews were carried out with officers in the education departments of ten Local Education Authorities. All had felt the impact of major national disputes from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The most important legacy of this experience so far as the law was concerned was that it had now become generally the case that any significant industrial action would lead to Authorities considering whether to make deductions from the pay of workers concerned. Modification to the structure for the provision of public sector education under the Education Acts of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a far more important legal influence. This required significant change in established industrial relations and employment practices and could be a cause of dispute to which the labour legislation of the 1980s was of limited relevance.

Public participation and policy: unpacking connections in one British LA21

YesWithin western cultures, the term `public participation¿ has strong positive connotations, and is associated with the promotion of democracy. The contention of this paper is that these invocations of democracy - although not entirely inaccurate - obscure the varied and tangible effects of public participation on wider policy processes. Drawing on Sharp and Connelly 2001, this paper argues that participation should not be analysed in terms of the type of democracy it invokes, but rather in terms of the extent and nature of its influence on the policy process. In particular, the policy process is examined for conflict between participants over (1) the extent of participation, (2) the nature of participation and (3) the influence of the participation, as well as (4) the outcomes to which it leads. This approach to the analysis of participation is demonstrated through a study of one element of participation in an authority¿s Local Agenda 21 process. The paper concludes that participation is inherently political and practitioners need to act strategically to manage participation in support of progressive agendas

Women's networks: their participation in and influence on the sustainable development agenda.

Through a selective review of the literature on sustainable development, this thesis identifies the concepts of networking, participation and redistribution as crucial to the philosophy and politics of sustainable development. Feminist perspectives on these concepts are used as analytical tools in a study of women's networks and their participation in, and influence on, the sustainable development agenda and the implementation of Agenda 21 (UN, 1992) in the 1990s. It is argued that the participation of women's networks in developing the sustainability agenda, although crucial to the implementation of Agenda 21. was limited. The dynamics between political actors resulting from international agreements, such as Agenda 21. and the influence of women's networks on associated processes and outcomes are currently under researched in the literature. This is explored in the thesis. It is suggested that the principles of associative democracy, group representation and “user involvement" could be synthesized and employed to strengthen democratic representation in the political arena relating to the sustainability agenda. It is further suggested that these principles could serve as a model for similar exercises in the future. The methodology used is qualitative. An empirical study involving interviews and participant observation of women's networks is presented. So too is a critical review of the "grey" literature on the influence of women's networks on Agenda 21 and the scholarly literature on the implementation of local Agenda 21 (LA21). The need for LA21 consultations to take account of the views of women's networks, and for new forms of democratic representation to be developed is illustrated

Local environmental policy and local government restructuring in Britain: The tensions between compulsory competitive tendering and local agenda 21

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University

The impact of compulsory competitive tendering on refuse collection services

Compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) of blue-collar services such as refuse collection and street cleaning was introduced in the UK by the Local Government Act 1988. This law, imposed by central government, obliged elected local authorities to expose specific services to competitive tendering at fixed intervals and subject to national guidelines. Whilst the issue of competitive tendering of public services has generated a substantial literature over recent years (see Domberger and Rimmer (1994) for a review), there have been relatively few studies of compulsory competitive tendering.2 This paper uses a dataset on refuse collection costs and services for the 365 English local authorities over the period 1984-94. It follows on from Szymanski and Wilkins (1993) who analysed the same database using data up until 1988