The quality of local governance matters more than ever before. To many citizens, their local government is the most tangible form of government, and it is also the layer of government with which they have most contact in their everyday life. The power of the local administration is that it represents ordinary citizens. People eat, drink, work, play and socialise with others in towns and cities. To be fully effective, local government management and service delivery capacity needs to be strong, and resources need to be adequate. Civil society and businesses are essential actors in ensuring local governments have the capacity to meet the needs of its citizens. There are a host of challenges that confront local government in the 21st century: delivering quality services; lack of finance and local fiscal autonomy; engaging citizens and communities in meaningful and authentic ways; forming effective partnerships which incentivize local actors to find solutions to the many complex and intractable issues facing communities; generating inclusive and sustainable development; implementing strategies for disaster risk reduction; managing transparent communications; and, rapidly evolving technologies and socio-economic demographics. The Governance of Local Communities: Global Perspectives and Challenges is about the role that ideas, institutions, and actors play in structuring how people govern local communities and, more specifically, the types of adaptations necessary in local government roles and responsibilities, structures, and processes to effectively respond to a changing local government environment. Global changes require that we rethink local governance. A wide net of international experts on local governance was assembled for this volume to stimulate frank conversations around the many contemporary challenges facing local government.

Global, national and subnational change (political, economic, social and demographic) are forcing local governments to search, reactively or proactively, for alternative organizational patterns and management styles. This book explores different approaches toward local government reorientation in selected Western countries as well as the 'reinvention' of local government in Eastern Europe. Eight national case-studies (U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Norway, Israel, the Czech Republic and Russia) provide the empirical basis. From a theoretical point of view, the book exposes three main critical factors: the range of policy options facing local governments (strategic choice), their organizational capabilities to cope with major environmental shifts (strategic capabilities), and their capacity for organizational learning (including programmed experimentation, innovation and creativity).

Sound HRM practices matter—they are a sine qua non of effective governance in democratic government—equally so at the local, regional, state and national levels of government. The NASPAA (Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration) accreditation standards demand critical competencies for public managers that are vital to human resource managers and supervisors at all levels. These competencies include: skills to lead and manage in public governance; to participate in and contribute to the policy process; to analyze, synthesize, think critically, solve problems and make decisions; to articulate and apply a public service perspective; and to communicate and interact productively with a diverse and changing workforce and citizenry. This second edition of Human Resource Management is designed specifically with these competencies in mind to: Introduce and explore the fundamental purposes of human resource management in the public service and consider the techniques used to accomplish these purposes Provide exercises to give students practice for their skills after being introduced to the theory, foundation, and practices of public and nonprofit sector HRM Facilitate instruction of the material by introducing important topics and issues with readings drawn from the professional literature Provide information and examples demonstrating the interrelatedness of many of the topics in public sector HRM and the trends shaping public and nonprofit management, especially diversity, ethics, and technology. Demonstrate and describe differences among HRM practices in public, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and between the levels of government. Human Resource Management is organized to provide a thorough discussion of the subject matter with extensive references to relevant literature and useful teaching tools. Thus, students will consider the issues, purposes, and techniques of HRM and conceptualize how varied their roles are, or will be, whether a personnel specialist in a centralized system or a supervisor managing in one of the increasingly common decentralized systems. Each chapter includes a thorough review of the principles and practices of HRM (including the why and the how), selected readings, important themes, diverse examples, key terms, study questions, applied exercises, case studies, and examples of forms and processes would-be managers will encounter in their roles.

Local governments do not stand alone—they find themselves in new relationships not only with state and federal government, but often with a widening spectrum of other public and private organizations as well. The result of this re-forming of local governments calls for new collaborations and managerial responses that occur in addition to governmental and bureaucratic processes-as-usual, bringing locally generated strategies or what the authors call "jurisdiction-based management" into play. Based on an extensive study of 237 cities within five states, Collaborative Public Management provides an in-depth look at how city officials work with other governments and organizations to develop their city economies and what makes these collaborations work. Exploring the more complex nature of collaboration across jurisdictions, governments, and sectors, Agranoff and McGuire illustrate how public managers address complex problems through strategic partnerships, networks, contractual relationships, alliances, committees, coalitions, consortia, and councils as they function together to meet public demands through other government agencies, nonprofit associations, for-profit entities, and many other types of nongovernmental organizations. Beyond the "how" and "why," Collaborative Public Management identifies the importance of different managerial approaches by breaking them down into parts and sequences, and describing the many kinds of collaborative activities and processes that allow local governments to function in new ways to address the most nettlesome public challenges.

Perspectives on Management Capacity Building provides a lively spectrum of views on the problems and prospects of improving the management and performance of municipal governments in the United States. Leading specialists in public administration probe the management needs of local governments and explore ways in which they can improve their capacity to manage. Today, state and local governments are caught in the transition between the expansionism of the post-World War II years and the retrenchment era of the late seventies and eighties. Improved management capacity has emerged as the most effective way for local governments to ride out the economic and political pressures confronting them. This book first investigates the meaning of the term "management capacity." It then considers how management needs have changed in the post-war period and how these needs vary among large cities, suburbs, and rural communities. Two of the contributions explore the organizational politics of management improvement while others look at the functional areas of computers and financial management. The book also addresses human resource problems such as labor relations, management development, and training of municipal legislators, and concludes with several viewpoints on federal efforts to improve local management capacity.

After working for nearly three years to improve the performance of the government of Flint, Michigan—and discovering that there was no comprehensive work on the subject of local-government management to refer to—Brian Rapp and Frank M. Patitucci felt a personal as well as a professional need to write a book that would help them understand their successes and failures, and that would help others do a better job in similar situations. The result, this book, is unique both in its approach and in its presentation. The authors, establishing a conceptual framework within which to understand their subject, use Flint as a case city to examine the practical impact of factors affecting city government, and they indicate the major standards and criteria that should be applied in evaluating that impact. Although they recognize that within each city there are unique conditions that make a blanket prescription impossible, the authors are nevertheless convinced that many individuals both in and out of government can do something to improve the performance of their city government, and they have set out to help these individuals understand, in the most concrete terms possible, how they might go about it.