Measuring Local Well-being: reflections on the Local Government (Community Well-Being) Amendment Bill. The Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill is designed to provide local authorities with greater legal freedom to make investments that will raise the well-being of their local community. The legislation is predicated on the assumption that people’s well-being is influenced by their local context. In order to identify the influence of changes in context generated by local investments, it is necessary to recognise that individuals differ in many ways and that the impact of any given investment can vary substantially from one person to the next. Indicators based on collections of individuals miss much of that variation. It is also necessary to recognise the variety of ways well-being can be measured. This short article raises both these issues by exploring three measures of well-being currently available on the 2018 Quality of Life survey.

Access to people, goods, ideas and services is the basis of economic development in cities. The better this access, the greater the economic benefits through economies of scale, agglomeration effects and networking advantages. The way in which cities facilitate accessibility also impacts directly on other key aspects of human development, social inclusion and well-being. Accessibility is created through a complex interplay of urban form and transport systems. Thus, governing urban accessibility requires moving beyond conventional urban transport considerations linked to mobility and movement. Such a re-framing implies a far greater recognition of urban form characteristics like land use, distribution of densities and urban design, in addition to transport characteristics like infrastructures, service levels and travel speeds. A new interface between these characteristics has emerged as a result of shared mobility systems, putting additional pressure on city governments to act as system integrators. Based on a literature review, empirical insights from a global survey and the case-study cities of London, NYC and Berlin, this paper explores the institutional capacities of shifting from governing urban transport to urban accessibility. The evidence shows that there are entrenched misalignments which may impact negatively on the capacity to pair planning and policies essential for delivering better accessibility. Furthermore, it is clear that “hierarchies” and “networks” are not mutually exclusive when it comes to integrated governance of accessibility. The findings also suggest that cities may be better equipped to integrate shared mobility and consider mobility as a service than to pursue more wide-ranging metropolitan accessibility policies.

This paper contributes to the literature on government transparency by addressing the question of what drives the differences in local government levels of transparency. Our main objective is to ascertain whether transparency is mainly driven by the leadership, capacity and other political traits of the local governments themselves – “supply-side determinants” – or, rather, if it hinges on social, cultural and/or other local community factors (“demand-side” determinants). We test the hypotheses derived from this theoretical framework using the results of the Municipal Transparency Index which is based on the information disclosed in the local governments' official websites and was applied to all Portuguese municipalities for the first time in 2013. Our findings indicate that municipalities with less financial autonomy, run by male mayors, with a larger number of consecutive terms in office, and smaller margins of victory in local elections display lower levels of transparency. On the demand-side, the unemployment rate and the average age of the municipal population emerge as the best predictors and are both negatively associated with transparency.

Although it is now over two decades since the Brundtland Commission report (1987) put sustainable development on the political map, concern continues in Canada that the federal government is failing to adequately implement its own commitments to tackling the ecological challenges posed by rapid urban expansion. Our analysis identifies a number of road blocks, missed opportunities and mistakes that have limited progress and many of these are traced back to the failure of national government to empower local municipal governments, as advocated by Brundtland and subsequent international initiatives, in particular ‘Agenda 21’ which we revisit in some detail as a basis for analysis. As well as reviewing the federal government’s role in Canada, the paper explores the potential for more sustainable urban growth in the context of broader reforms

The United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Capacity and Institution Building (CIB) Working Group gather together professional practitioners of local government associations (LGAs) and individual local governments active in international cooperation, with the overall objective to improve the quality, coordination and alignment of their development cooperation interventions.The Working Group is the successor of the CIB Platform, which existed for many years within the former International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) as an informal gathering of staff members of local government associations (LGAs) involved in the field of municipal international cooperation (MIC) and association capacity building (ACB). In addition to information exchange, the CIB Platform undertook specific initiatives such as a World Bank-funded program supporting ACB in several countries. In May 2004, the CIB was integrated into the structures of the newly-founded UCLG organisation, and its membership was expanded to also include staff members of international departments of cities active in international cooperation.