Local government
Almost every country has a system of local government, and over the years, the trend has been towards local democracy and decentralisation. But the actual degree of power, responsibility and autonomy of the local authorities in different countries varies widely, as does the structure of local government (average size, number of levels and types of authority etc.). There is now – with the economic crisis – a risk of recentralisation by central or state governments.
Jeremy Smith has a unique experience in local and regional government – top-level manager in London’s local government in the UK, 8 years knowledge and experience of Europe’s local government system as Secretary General of CEMR, and also having a global knowledge and experience of local government worldwide, where he has worked with local government associations, national development ministries, UN agencies, and international organisations.
He has been both advocate and policy drafter at each level, e.g. on implementing the European Charter of Local Self-Government, and in getting the UN member states to adopt standard-setting Guidelines on decentralization and the strengthening of local authorities . He also writes and speaks on the financial impact of the economic crisis on local and regional government.
Jeremy Smith: 28th June
The Council of Europe – the not-the-European-Union organisation of wider Europe (47 countries at last count) – is best known for the work of its Court of Human Rights, and has a general remit to promote democracy and human rights. It is also in the news just now because its Parliamentary Assembly has voted unanimously against a general banning of the burqa or nijab, and criticized the recent Swiss law against the building of minarets. (By the way, the football bit is at the end of this post!)
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 By Jeremy Smith, 1st June 2010
Léogane is a medium-sized town in south-west Haiti where Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first emperor of Haiti (1804-06), is said to have married the future empress Marie-Claire Heureuse, with Toussaint L’Ouverture as best man.
Léogane achieved a far sadder fame on 12th January this year, as the town at the epicentre of the giant earthquake which devastated much of the country. About 80% of the houses and buildings of the town were destroyed or badly damaged, with probably thousands dead.
It was therefore logical that Léogane should be chosen, together with its three neighbouring communes, by Haiti’s Minister of the Interior and Territorial Authorities, Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé (great name for a politician) for a new international local government initiative. I am proud to play a part.
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By Jeremy Smith, 5th June 2010
It’s nice when the light of understanding flashes in your brain – and yesterday I had to thank Professor Adam Tooze, an expert on Germany at Yale, for turning on my halogen bulb…
Though fully aware of the (how do I put it?) counter-Keynesianism of the German government and political establishment, I couldn’t help being puzzled by their approach to the Greek crisis, which seemed almost calculated to damage the European Union.
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Jeremy Smith April 19
I’m sitting here in London with fingers crossed - on Friday I’m due to fly to Chicago, a city I haven’t been to since I hitch-hiked round the States, um, quite a few years ago… I keep looking at the web to see what mood the Icelandic Gods are in, and whether they will relent in time to let me fly.
My reason for travel – our world organisation of cities, UCLG, has its Executive Bureau meeting there, at the invitation of Mayor Daley, and I am helping with the planning of UCLG’s City Leaders Summit, hosted by Mexico City in November.
Meanwhile I have been watching the amazing BBC TV documentary “Welcome to Lagos” which looks at the hard and enterprising lives of that mega-city’s poor, including the scavengers on the city’s rubbish dumps… an echo of the dust heaps evoked by Dickens in “Our Mutual Friend”, plus a practical demonstration of how to live the EU’s waste hierarchy (reuse, recycle…). Some think today’s Lagos is the reality of tomorrow’s city, and that we should accept and celebrate this. I am not convinced by this argument, however much we admire the resilience of the Lagos-ians, and the commitment of their mayor.
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 October 2009 Barcelona and Reykjavik; January 2010 Strasbourg – these are just the latest major cities to sign up to the European Charter for Equality of women and men in local life.
Nearly 1000 towns, cities and regions have committed themselves to gender equality across the range of their powers, since the Charter was first launched at our congress in Innsbruck in 2006, and signed by Hilde Zach, the feisty and tireless Mayor of that beautiful Austrian city.
Drafting the Charter was not easy – it is quite a dense document (even I must confess!), which at one and the same time asserts legal rights, and also offers practical ideas and guidance. The aim is that every town and city that signs up should have and implement a real gender action plan. The Charter covers all of the different roles of the local authority – political and democratic representation, major employer, service deliverer, contractor… there’s a section on all of these.
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Last Thursday I was back in Brussels, invited by the European Parliament’s special committee on the financial, economic and social crisis. My mission – to highlight the really serious financial problems now facing Europe’s local and regional governments, just as growing un-(and under) employment make their public services ever more essential.
I gave them the key points of the November 2009 survey of national local government associations which CEMR had conducted. The results were overwhelmingly pessimistic… three quarters said things had got worse for their members (the individual towns etc.) during 2009, and about half thought they would get worse in 2010 – under 10%, mainly in Scandinavia, thought they would improve this year. Over two-thirds thought that councils’ budgets would reduce in real terms in 2010, and a similar proportion said their income had reduced substantially in 2009.
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