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Please find enclosed a call for papers on  Politics and Management of Local Public-Sector Reforms

for the International Public Management Journal

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Call for Paper Proposals        International Public Management Journal

Symposium on the Politics and Management of Local Public-Sector Reform: A Global Perspective on Local Government Reinvigoration

Guest Editors:
Quinton Mayne - Harvard Kennedy School
Eran Vigoda-Gadot - University of Haifa

Local authorities play a key democratic role in societies across the globe. As the first tier of elected government, city and municipal officials are closest to the ground, living and working among the people that they serve. Widespread processes of decentralization in recent decades also mean that local governments have grown in importance in planning and delivering a wide range of goods and services on which citizens and communities depend.
Yet despite their importance, local governments have traditionally played second fiddle to national authorities in policy debates about public-sector modernization. This has changed, however, in recent years. Eager to reduce the cost of public services while also making them more responsive to the demands of citizens and communities, local and national politicians have become increasingly aware of the need to reinvigorate management practices and organizational forms in cities and municipalities across Europe, the United States, and beyond.

While increased public and political attention to local government reform may be more recent in many places, over the years scholars working in the fields of public management and public administration, and to some extent political science, have produced a large number of studies about local-government reforms. This includes work on the managerial shift from centralized to decentralized and hybrid modes of governance, as well as work on the rise of NPM and post-NPM ideas related to open markets, performance management and measurement, as well mechanisms for encouraging and coordinating the involvement of new actors in public problem-solving.

This symposium aims to address two key weaknesses of existing work on local public-sector reform. The first is the fact that little of this research is by design rooted in a cross-national, comparative framework. While as a community of scholars we have increasingly engaged with each other's work, the accumulation of systematic comparative knowledge on the form, causes, and consequences of local public-sector reform has been difficult. In addition, within single-country
research, choices of research design and methodology have made it challenging to generalize findings across space and over time.
The second limitation of existing research, which this symposium aims to address, is the relative underdevelopment of political analyses of local public-sector reform. Much has been written on this topic from a management and organizational perspective as well as in terms of the policy consequences of different types of reforms. Less comparative work has been done, however, on testing for the political factors and forces that facilitate and/or hamper local public-sector reform or indeed on identifying the political consequences (good and bad) of local public-sector reform.
With these observations in mind, the primary goal of this symposium is to provide a platform for research offering insights and knowledge on the politics of local public-sector reform with broad comparative appeal. Specifically, we hope the symposium will enrich this field of study by publishing work that advances systematic political comparisons across cases and countries. We welcome both conceptual and empirical research. This includes paper proposals that offer theoretical and analytic frameworks that streamline, synthesize, and integrate prior work on local public-sector reform. It also includes paper proposals for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods papers that employ research designs aimed at developing generalizable knowledge about the politics of local public-sector reform.
It is our strong belief that the field is striving for new and inspiring ideas, fresh global thinking, and innovative models for change and renewal of existing local government administration. Our hope is that the symposium will set the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding and evaluation of local public-sector reform in Europe and the United States, as well as other countries and regions. Our aim is also that the symposium will yield papers with politically-rooted, policy-oriented recommendations about the design and implementation of local public-sector reform. Given the key political and policy role played by local governments, coupled with the research and practice-oriented objectives of this symposium, we hope that the final publication will contribute significantly to the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the public sector.
Submission, contacts, and timetable:

1. Paper abstracts (approx. 300 words) due August 1, 2016, followed by invitation of selected abstracts.
2. Full manuscript submission by November 1, 2016, followed by a review process and invitation of revisions.
3. Receipt of revisions by February 1, 2017.
4. Anticipated final decisions by March 2017.
All paper abstracts should be sent to the Guest Editors at eranv@poli.haifa.ac.il and quinton_mayne@harvard.edu.