Supplements include a Companion Website (www.oup.com/us/simon) as well as a comprehensive Test Bank for instructors. --

Drawing on fundamental ideas about the relationship of citizens to the public sphere, Richard C Box presents a model of `citizen governance'. Recognizing the challenges in the community governance setting, he advocates rethinking the structure of local government and the roles of citizens, elected officials and public professionals in the twenty-first century. His model shifts a large part of the responsibility for local public policy from the professional and the elected official to the citizen. Citizens take part directly in creating and implementing policy, elected officials coordinate the policy process, and public professionnals facilitate citizen discourse, offering the knowledge of public practice needed for successful `citizen gover

This book explores some of the opportunities and risks - economic, social and technological - that decision-makers will have to address, and outlines what needs to be done to foster society's capacity to manage its future more flexibly and with broader participation of its citizens.

In 1997 the State of California Legislature created the Commission on Local Governance for the 21st Century to review current statutes &, where appropriate, recommend revisions to the laws that govern city, county, and special district boundary changes. Over a period of 16 months, the Commission held 25 days of public hearings, received over 100 recommendations, and had nearly 90,000 visits to the commission's website. Based upon this extensive input and deliberations on the information received, the Commission has issued this report, which concludes with a strategic plan for its implementation by the California Legislature. Illustrated.

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of territorial change on the municipal level across all European countries. Taking a thematic and comparative perspective, the book builds on extensive quantitative data and a large survey of academic experts in 33 European countries. Territorial organisation of the municipal level in Europe is strongly diversified and yet far from stable. Politically speaking, territorial reforms tend to be risky and difficult, as such changes affect vital interests and identities. Despite such difficulties, the last two decades have witnessed considerable changes in territorial divisions at the municipal level across a range of European countries. In this book, the authors describe and analyse these changes comprehensively, making a vital contribution to understanding the reasons and dynamics of territorial reform processes. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in local or sub-national government, institutional design and more broadly to political science, public administration/policy, human geography, sociology and economics.