Hybrid Governance In European Cities

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How are responses to urban policy challenges affected by new ideas about governance? How can we explain the governance transformations that result? And what are the consequences for democracy? This wide-ranging study of three European cities - Birmingham, Copenhagen and Rotterdam - shows how hybrid forms of governance emerge from the tensions between new visions and past legacies, and existing institutional arrangements and powerful actors.

Hybrid governance includes public-private partnerships, stakeholders boards, and multi-actor forums operating at arm's length to institutions of representative democracy. Offering detailed studies of migration and neighbourhood policy, as well as a novel Q methodology analysis of public administrators' views on democracy, the book explores how actors generate new practices, shows how these develop, and evaluates the democratic implications.

The book concludes that hybrid governance is both widespread and diverse, is spatially and policy specific and that actors - public managers, politicians and the public - contribute to hybrid designs in ways that promote and challenge democratic conventions. Review: This book offers a welcome engagement with the complexity of governance in modern cities as a result of global and local pressures, citizen demands and new uncertainties in the role of nation states.

It is theoretically sophisticated, deconstructing the concept of hybridity and showing what happens as emerging practices challenge the conventionally defined boundaries of governance. It is also strongly empirically grounded, offering comparative research on particular urban places within Europe, and on particular policy spaces within them.

As such it marks the turn to 'third generation' governance research, and will be of value both to academics, students and policy actors. Janet Newman, Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Science, The Open University, UK. 'In this book, Skelcher, Sullivan and Jeffares present a critical analysis of the performance and accountability and democratic anchorage of networks and other hybrid organizations.

Drawing on cross-national studies on policy networks, the authors demonstrate that hybrid organizations are not merely instruments, but also important arenas of governance. The book is an important contribution to the third generation research on networks in urban governance.' - Jon Pierre, Professor in the Department of Politics, University of Gothenberg, Sweden.

Governance problems are without any doubt the most important and difficult challenges that urban governments face in modern society. Skelcher, Jeffares and Sullivan give a vivid and fascinating look at local governance practices in three large cities, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Rotterdam and the mixture of governance modes and cultures that can be found there.

The comparison enables them to show us the contextual way governance solutions in cities evolve and are applied. Erik-Hans Klijn is Professor in Public Administration, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.