This article explores the contribution that local government to local government partnerships can make in bringing about more effective and sustained decentralisation through developing the capacity of local governments to deliver improved services to the communities they serve. After almost 15 years of decentralization many of Papua New Guinea’s local governments struggle to maintain essential functions. Building on existing relationships, the Commonwealth Local Government Good Practice Scheme seeks to utilize the resources and knowledge of Australian local councils in partnership with those in Papua New Guinea to build capacity and improve the management and delivery of services to communities. This article examines the program to date, outlining both the successes and failures, but also the potential role such partnerships can play in the deepening of democratic governance at the local level.

Structural reform has been one of the most important and hotly contested features of modern local government. From North America to Europe to Australasia, local government boundaries have been redrawn over the last two decades. In many countries it seems that structural change has been the ‘default’ option to which successive generations of policy makers are irresistibly drawn time and time again. And yet the reasons for the extraordinary popularity of this particular policy instrument and, more importantly, its impacts are under-researched. There is a dearth of rigorous empirical analysis of the costs and benefits and the relative effectiveness of different kinds of structural change and different approaches to implementing them. The Theory and Practice of Local Government Reform, edited by Brian E. Dollery and Lorenzo Robotti, is then a very welcome attempt to address these issues in comprehensive and comparative fashion, which draws upon expert knowledge of recent developments from across an impressive range of different countries and contexts.

This paper identifies types of citizen participation in local government in Australia, in particular focusing on the past two decades when local government systems have been the focus of intense reform. The paper considers the extent to which contemporary views of participatory governance have taken root at local and sub-local levels and concludes that despite reforms intended to engage local citizens more in local government activity, citizen participation has yet to develop significantly into arrangements that reach the level of participatory governance. It also argues that for participatory governance to be further developed, leadership may often have to come from organisations outside institutional local government.

In an assessment of representative democracy in Australian local government, this paper considers long-run changes in forms of political representation, methods of vote counting, franchise arrangements, numbers of local government bodies and elected representatives, as well as the thorny question of constitutional recognition. This discussion is set against the background of ongoing tensions between the drive for economic efficiency and the maintenance of political legitimacy, along with more deep-seated divisions emerging from the legal relationship between local and state governments and the resultant problems inherent in local government autonomy versus state intervention.

This book is about the role that ideas, institutions, and actors play in structuring how we govern cities and, more specifically, what projects or paths are taken. Global changes require that we rethink governance and urban policy, and that we do so through the dual lens of theory and practice.