With the title of “Democracy from below. New agenda for the local government”, Inter-university Institute for Local Development (IIDL) researchers of Universitat de València, together with other prestigious professionals, coordinated by professors Joan Romero and Andrés Boix, published a book which proposes a road map for a good governance of new councils which will appear at polls on 24th May.
This work has a subtitle which is “Public policies, social cohesion and good governance at the Valencian Region after the local system reform”. The proposal of such work is to propose an agenda of public policies and possible reforms without the need of waiting for legal changes, which is comparable to other autonomous regions. The book was edited by Publicacions de la Universitat de València (PUV) in ePub format, free downloadable.
This work, according professor Joan Romero “it is the result of an effort made by a a large group of university researchers who wanted to make available the new local corporations, analysis tools and proposals which you can face challenges which will be opened from the following elections in a very practical way, both in the concept of the work and in its open electronic edition for an easy access from anyone interested. It is also, Romero added, “a research made available to policy makers and to public servants, which responds to a way of understanding public service from university”
The publication starts with one of the Juan Romero’s works on the challenges the government is facing right now. “The cities -he sais- started gaining importance as political actors, so beyond the attempts of reducing the central government’s local autonomy and its abilities, there is a wide margin to promote public policies and draft democratic innovations if there is political will to do it”.
Right after, Andrés Boix will make a competitive analysis of local entities. He will expose the basic lines of the local reform of 2013 and its competitive consequences so, from a study of the basic law of local Spanish system and Valencian laws, it can design a framework from the possible competitive ceiling for the municipalities and other Valencian local entities, explaining the several mechanisms of competence attributions or delegation of specific functions which allow the development of public policies. Josep Maria Pascual will close the first segment of the book with a proposal of new democratic governance of great participatory strength from the exigency of higher quality of the public action, e influencing in a special way in political culture and in the formation of municipal public servants.
What to do after 24th March?
At a second block of work, a group of experts analyse the various various sectorial public policies which make the local public action from a similar starting question and from a model of common analysis. The starting question that the different teams had to face is the following one: the constituted autonomous and local government, without the need of having to wait for legal changes, from the legal framework currently in force, both national and autonomous, which possibilities are there to promote a new agenda of public policies in the local scale in case of exiting a political will of doing it? From the corresponding analysis, every chapter will be finished with a number of specific proposals which look for the improvement of life conditions in the lives of citizens, of efficiency of the public policies and of the social and territorial cohesion. “There are proposals -sais Andrés Boix- which aim to be detailed and accurate, up to a point that they can be constructed in a guide for those new local and autonomous administrations which share the diagnosis we did in this book”. Furthermore, he added, “these proposals, were developed both in their final aspect (what to do to improve) and in their functional and organic aspect (from which it is convenient to do in each case), with the goal of giving content to the different scales of public interventions. Each chapter has a final summary-square where several proposals are organised in order to identify the competitive level in which sharing is considered to be more accurately with the idea of easing a certain degree of homogeneity and of making easier the consultation of suggestions made.
Through this procedure, the advantages of the collaboration among different political actors, their challenges and insufficiencies (Josep Sorribes) were analysed, and the need of incorporating the metropolitan scale, in this case with special incidence in the metropolitan area of Valencia, in the formulation of policies (María Dolores Pitarch); management of the territory, environmental and landscape policies (José Vicente Sánchez) and their derivatives in the subject of planning and urban management (Eduardo García); the challenges in in the subject of managing social services and the best way of dealing with them (thanks to a team coordinated by Xavier Uceda and Lucía Martínez); the local policies on education and on training and permanent learning (José Veiga); the local action in cultural matter (Reyes Marzal); the housing policies (José Manuel Luis- Hortolano); and the local scale intervention in the sustainable transport as an action on urban public space (Andrés Boix and Reyes Marzal).
Deliberations will be closed with a work of the Group of Analysis about the Rural Areas coordinated by Javier Esparcia centred on the present situation and on the needed specific attention to the rural municipalities. The work will end with a study of Fernando Jiménez on which measures must be adopted in a transversal way to fight disaffection and distrust among the citizens, to understand and to exercise democracy in another way and to give sense to the idea of a good governance at local scale.
Currently led by professor Joan Noguera, the IIDL has more than 30 professors and researchers at the headquarters of Universitat de València, dedicated to the analysis and investigation of every measurement of development from the territory.
Last update: 15 de may de 2015 11:42.
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