Absent the types of decision-making arrangements that extend from the logic of democratic political theory, public managers may proceed without an intellectual basis for criticizing the negative effects of growth, the proliferation of barely-accountable special districts, the increasing polarization between inner cities and their suburbs or other concerns that are crucial to the legitimacy of government. They will continue to foster the view that the central issues of urban development are beyond the reach of local government; but clearly, they are not.
Recent years have witnessed a new slate of developmental strategies, some of which have been designed to empower locally-driven solutions that is, to open government to the neighborhood organizations, civic groups, and labor unions that had previously existed, but had been excluded from development planning. Related strategies have been designed to increase accountability for the private firms and institutions that receive public incentives for their roles in development. Other strategies seek to link downtowns and neighborhoods in a more redistributive fashion by including requirements for minority and female business purchasing and targeted hiring. Still others attempted to balance the benefits and costs of development across economic sectors, size of business, and areas of the city (Mier, 1993; Krumholz, forthcoming). But, even with these strategies, the call for democratic policymaking will not be answered on a consistent basis without an understanding of the three theoretical bases discussed above. These bases, underwritten by the five suggested democratic conditions, demand that public managers infuse urban regimes with normative (i.e., democratic) concerns and with appropriately designed organizations and institutions. Too often, regimes and policy processes are understood partially and descriptively. As a result, policy is described not in terms of its contribution to political governance, but in terms of how it came to be in the midst of certain struggles.
At present, none of the fields that or prepare students for participation in urban affairs, combine these perspectives. As a result, students are trained to survive an urban political jungle rather than to master a urban system of governance. A nexus of fields such as urban studies, public administration, and planning could begin to combine these theoretical approaches, especially since they are so rich in potential even though they are unlikely to congeal conceptually and normatively. Our review of these approaches, demonstrate the possibility of how each can be configured for such a conceptual advance. This advance will not be easy in light of what appears to be a general uneasiness to grapple with normative theory or the lack of rewards for synthesizing and creating scholarship across what are usually treated as separate academic units. Without such convergence, governance will remain an academic concept and politics will continue to be viewed as an endless series of struggles to dominate rather than as a process of governance.
Using this, or some other normative approach, to intervene in these dynamics or to re-capture the publics authority from the control of private interests, will also require a willingness to engage in long (and often times expensive) political struggles with powerful people, institutions, and organizations. Answering governments normative calling involves more than articulating the unspoken interests of unwitting citizens and stakeholders. It involves, if nothing else, an attempt to alter well-established patterns of benefit distribution. And, any attempt to do so will not go unnoticed for the public to win, someone has to lose (Holupka & Shlay, 1993). However, appropriately trained students could begin to take the lead in redesigning our urban governance structures. Such redesign will not provide panaceas. Global competition, metropolitan fragmentation based on race and class, highly partisan politics and the like will continue to mark most urban policy contexts. However, the redesign will pave the way for more effective, and thus more legitimate, governance systems which implement more democratic policy processes.
Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.
About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. Hes now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see
http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.