Splitting up the Second City is a third-rate idea

Andrew Coulson            

Relations between first and second cities are often strained, especially when those who live in the Second City elect leaders from a political party that is not running the national government – as has been the case with Birmingham for much of its life.

After the Second World War, Birmingham was prosperous. It had avoided most of the bombing that destroyed the centre of Coventry, and its factories had produced aircraft, lorries, and other vehicles and equipment for the military and were now available to meet the post-war demand for cars and lorries. Wages for semi-skilled labour were some of the highest in the country.  There were shortages of labour, and to meet them employers welcomed bus drivers, conductors and nurses. These were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by workers mainly from Pakistan and Kashmir.

From the perspective of the London government, Birmingham did not need more employment, so companies who wished to invest in the motor industry were directed to Liverpool and elsewhere. But academic commentators, and the more thoughtful employers, could see that all was not well.  Britain was becoming increasingly dependent on service industries, which were far from strong in the Midlands.  In that context, in the mid-1970s, Birmingham Council proposed to build a National Exhibition Centre, on land near the airport. It would be owned by a company which was a partnership with Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.  The government wanted it in London; the council carried on regardless, and eventually the London government allowed it to do so.

Its structure was innovative – the company had just two shares, one owned by the city council, the other by the chamber. Each could nominate four directors. The chair would always be one of the chamber nominees – for a long time the leading industrialist Sir Adrian Cadbury.  But if voting on the board was tied, the chair did not have a casting vote, and what was proposed would not go ahead. The company, underwritten by the council, borrowed money and built the NEC.

A few years later, in 1987, the NEC company started building the International Convention Centre and Symphony Hall, on land off Broad Street. This was to make Birmingham a centre for conferences and business meetings. The decline in manufacturing and rising unemployment was by then so evident that Birmingham was granted Assisted Area Status by the European Union, so a fraction of the cost was met from Europe. The London government was not involved.

The ICC became a preferred location for large gatherings of professional bodies, such as the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, which grew till it hosted more than 8,000 delegates. It met in Birmingham every year for more than 25 years.  A boom in the construction of hotels met the demand for accommodation for this kind of event. Also of offices, many taken by national or international companies. No longer is Birmingham lagging in its provision of services. On the contrary it is a leader – almost entirely because of these initiatives.  Symphony Hall was built to meet the specification of Simon Rattle, then a very young but highly promising conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It was part of a city-council strategy to support the arts, of which another strand was the attraction of what became the Birmingham Royal Ballet to the Hippodrome theatre – with its charismatic directors, Peter Wright, David Bintley and now the Cuban star Carlos Acosta. Another initiative required investors in large buildings to put a small extra amount aside for public art.

The arrival of a national Conservative government in 2010 meant that the council started losing the extra grant it had long enjoyed to meet its high levels of deprivation, and put it under huge financial pressure. Whole levels of staffing in departments of the council were removed. Many senior officers did not stay long. Some posts were not filled. Others are filled by ‘interim’ staff, who are supplied by agencies, do not expect to stay in the city and are very unlikely to live in it.  

The refuse collection service was traditionally headed by an assistant director who had worked in the service for many years. For a period before the 2017 strike, this post was not filled, and the service was for a time run by the director of leisure. The strike was about reducing the number of operatives on each vehicle when wheelie bins were introduced. It was resolved by giving the workers improved pay.

It appears that it was only later that the implications of this for ‘single status’ were recognised, meaning that other categories of workers – in particular in social care – could claim equal pay for work assessed as equivalent. To meet the huge resulting costs, the city sold the NEC company for £300m. It was resold for £800 million three years later – a warning to the current commissioners not to sell this kind of asset on the cheap. Since then, the bin workers have managed to complete their shifts in less time than expected – partly assisted by some residents not putting their bins out every week – and been permitted to sign off early when their round was completed. Again, it has only recently been realised that this opens the city to another round of ‘single status’ claims.  Hence the near bankruptcy, Section 114 Notice, and appointment, by Michael Gove in London, of commissioners.

To resolve challenges such as this, when Birmingham is facing extreme pressures on all its services, will not be easy for the commissioners.

The worst thing they could do would be to split Birmingham into perhaps three smaller councils. This would increase the overhead costs – three directors of each service instead of one, three separate offices – and lose major economies of scale. It would also threaten the leadership and finance which is part of being the Second City – in the arts, in the representative institutions of local government, and in creating and implementing an economic strategy which responds to the local opportunities and needs which are most clear to people living in the city.

Andrew Coulson is a retired lecturer from INLOGOV and a former Birmingham City Councillor.  A longer version of this article was published in The Birmingham Post.  Andrew writes in a personal capacity.

The Jaws of Doom – still relevant a decade on

Chris Game

“Things from the past you’ll never see again”.  I came across a listing of these recently, and they were – well, moderately interesting. More so, anyway, than the accompanying “trends that have unfortunately returned” – pleated skirts, corsets, and structured vests, whatever they were.

The never-see-agains included smoking adverts, bubblegum cigarettes, and rotary push lawnmowers – to which I might easily have added “The Barnet Graph of Doom” as at least a never-expected-to-see-again.

It was a visual aid devised a dozen or so years ago primarily for the councillors of the London Borough of Barnet. It would come, however, to be associated with/appropriated by Birmingham City Council, and something with which some INLOGOV colleagues were so taken that it was discussed and illustrated in these pages not once but repeatedly – by, inter alia, me in May 2012 and January 2013 and the Institute’s then Director and this blog’s progenitor, Catherine Staite, in December 2012 and October 2013. Indeed, as Catherine notes in that second blog, it at least part-prompted an INLOGOV ‘book’ or, more accurately, Discussion Paper.

Impactful at the time, then, but at least not prominently, I presumed, over the ensuing decade. Certainly I, though at best semi-detached from these matters nowadays, was genuinely surprised to be confronted by its reappearance in a recent Financial Times (indeed, its double reappearance). Somewhat less so that it was credited entirely to Birmingham City Council, with Barnet getting, as my mother would have said, nary a mention. Which justifies at least a brief résumé, and for more senior readers a bit of reminiscence.

Some 15 years or so ago the very Conservative Barnet LBC acquired the not entirely flattering moniker of ‘easyCouncil’ – that precise orthography/spelling, though frequently ignored in the media, being arguably the policy’s most appealing attribute. With its stray upper-case C intendedly referencing the easyJet business model that inspired the council’s almost boundless outsourcing drive for no-frills efficiency, it embraced pretty well all services, from reduced-size waste bins and privatised street cleaning to limited ‘personalised’ adult social care budgets.    

Improved and cheaper services were obviously the aim, but senior officers foresaw that the sheer scale of demographic change – more children, more elderly – would in any foreseeable future take up an unmanageable proportion of the Council’s increasingly constricted budget. “No libraries, no parks, no leisure centres – not even bin collections”.  Hence the original Barnet Graph of Doom. The one on the left of the illustration, that is – the other, pleasing if more alarmist one, being a public ‘reminder’ tweeted a few years later, just as the social services budget was seriously taking off as forecast.

The Barnet graph, described at some length in my first blog and more summarily by the Guardian’s Public Services editor, David Brindle, started life as part of first a PowerPoint, later video, presentation used by the Council’s Chief Executive, Nick Walkley, to:

“focus the thoughts of colleagues and councillors …  In five to seven years we get to the point where it starts to restrict our ability to do anything very much else. Over a 20-year period, unless there was really radical corrective action, adult social care and children’s services would need to take up the totality of our existing budget.”

The tone, as Brindle noted, was deliberately alarmist, with the policy making no provision, inter alia, for Barnet’s anticipated rise in income through regeneration schemes. As an illustrative device, though, it was hugely effective. It featured regularly in local government media, and also in presentations by the late Sir Bob Kerslake – then Permanent Secretary at the DCLG, and whose outstanding career in both central and local government was fulsomely recounted following his recent death.

Alarming, yes, but “Where are the jaws?”, I hear you ask – and, of course, there weren’t any, yet. They were Birmingham Council’s contribution when it took the idea over and “simplified/dramatised” it by, as Patrick Butler put it, again in The Guardian, projecting “a ‘budget pressures’ line rising steeply to the top right of the grid, and a ‘grant reductions’ line crashing to the bottom right.”  It featured prominently as a ‘Jaws of Doom Graph’ in the council’s 2013 Budget Consultation document, and could indeed resemble, as Butler suggested, “a child’s depiction of a shark, or crocodile, about to bite its prey. Lunch, in this case, appears to be local government itself.”

In my January 2013 blog I sought to address the question of whether the ‘doom-mongering’ was entirely fair: Were “Birmingham and urban councils generally, or Labour councils, or the country’s most deprived areas, being particularly harshly treated by the government’s grant funding cuts?”

Which, you’ll be relieved to learn, I’ll not be bothering you with here – not least because, as already noted, for the vast bulk of the past decade I’ve personally given these particular ‘Jaws of Doom’ and their graph scarcely a passing thought. Now, though, I wonder whether that’s simply another consequence of a retiree’s detachment from the daily concerns and parlance of local government personnel. Could it be that this is what today’s finance officers jaw about, as it were, down the pub of an evening?

For suddenly there it was, weeks before the journalistic ‘silly season’, and in ‘The Pink Un’ – no, not Norwich City FC’s newsletter, but the albeit self-styled “worldʼs leading global business publication”: “The Jaws of Doom” graph in its original glory, and not once but twice. First, in a kind of editorial intro by Associate Editor, Stephen Bush, commending to readers William Wallis’ “excellent piece … featuring this alarming chart [shown on the right below] about the … ‘jaws of doom’ facing local authorities”.  And then Wallis’ article itself.

As you’d expect, it’s a good summary presentation – that I’d certainly be recommending to students, if I still had any – the thrust of which is that:

 “for more than a decade, local authorities in England have been sacrificing services and staff to what they call “the jaws of doom” – a reference to a graphic produced by Birmingham city council to show worsening budgetary pressures, that resembled a crocodile’s mouth.

Between rising demand for social care and other essential services, and the dwindling funds councils have received to provide these, discretionary spending on everything from libraries to youth clubs has already been eaten up.

Although local authorities won a better than usual financial settlement for 2023-24, 9.4% up on the year before, inflation running at 8.7% is eroding any benefits.”

And, having already well exceeded a thousand words, that’s where I’ll stop … though not before sharing the interesting and, more importantly, interactive graph of Sigoma’s English Indices of Multiple Deprivation also included in Wallis’ article – not new, so doubtless familiar to some readers, but to me unfamiliar, informative (see added results), surprising in places, and, I felt, worth sharing.  It made me (almost) sad not still to be lecturing and so able to play with it in public, as they say!

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social movements and the reinvention of democratic innovation

Sonia Bussu

Our world is experiencing multiple pressing crises; political elites’ inability or unwillingness to address them has contributed to diminishing trust in representative institutions. Democratic Innovations and participatory governance processes engaging citizens directly in politics and policymaking have been hailed as an antidote to elected representatives’ plummeting legitimacy. But they have also attracted much criticism, as they give much power to commissioning organisations, who design the process and choose who to invite, while there is limited follow-up on citizens’ recommendations.

Reclaiming Participatory Governance, a volume I co-edited with Adrian Bua for Routledge’s Democratic Innovations series, provides an analysis of how social and grassroots movements are reclaiming and reinventing democratic innovations to strengthen the impact of citizen participation for social change. The book is articulated into three main sections to provide 1) theoretical and 2) empirical analyses of these processes, and to reflect on 3) challenges to the implementation of radical projects of social transformation. Through 17 chapters covering a range of cases, the volume captures the growing synergy between social movements’ mobilisations, the commons and participatory deliberative democracy, exploring how grassroots democratic action is mobilising to foster alternative forms of participatory politics and economics.

Throughout the book we apply democracy-driven governance as an analytical framework. We initially developed this concept to describe how social movements and grassroots groups who mobilised across Spain against austerity politics in the early 2010s used the deliberative and participatory toolbox, first to build movement parties’ platforms and later, after winning elections in many major cities, to transform local state institutions. Democracy-driven governance captures these social-movements-led forms of democratic innovations that aim to widen the scope of participatory governance from political institutions to the economy and wider society.

It is a counterpoint to Mark Warren’s governance-driven democratisation which refers to democratic innovations mostly initiated by public agencies, particularly at the local level. Governance-driven democratisation responds to specific policy issues and what Warren calls “pluralised ungovernability” (2014, 49). This refers to situations of high complexity that administrators are caught in as they navigate, on the one hand, dispersion of governing capacity, and on the other hand, high interdependence. The potential of Warren’s governance-driven democratisation resides in its pragmatic, problem-solving orientation, addressing problems of political leadership and public administration. However, by decoupling politics and economics and failing to attend to socio-economic factors, the practice of governance-driven democratisation has been quite tokenistic, falling short of making substantive positive change to the lives of citizens, in a context of widening inequalities.

Both governance-driven democratisation and democracy-driven governance exist in a dynamic relationship, which shouldn’t be understood as a mere bottom-up v. top-down heuristic. They both attempt to foster participatory governance or to include citizens in the work of public administration through “routinised participation”. They also interact with other participatory spaces, such as oppositional politics (protests) and the commons, where citizens create their everyday democracy by managing public goods through their own democratic decision-making rules and with limited interactions with state institutions.

The contributions to the volume look at how democracy-driven governance emerges across different socio-political and geographical contexts, and how it develops and navigates (or fails to) the constraints of day-to-day politics and public administration. Firstly, we wanted to test the analytical power of democracy-driven governance. By applying these concepts to a range of diverse cases, the chapters help flesh out the empirical characteristics of different forms of participatory governance. Secondly, we were interested in assessing how democracy-driven governance’s aspirations to social justice fare when applied to the real world. Can it strengthen the politics of the commons by making it visible and linking it to state institutions, as in the case of civic management and community-wealth building in Barcelona, or collective electoral mandates in Brazil? Can it facilitate processes of decommodification to help re-embed the economy in democracy and the wider society? Are these new approaches to politics and policymaking sustainable in the face of existing legal, business and public administration constraints?

The contributions trace practical challenges, from participation fatigue and activists’ disappointment with the slow pace of administrative work, to bureaucrats’ resistance or the challenges of reconciling democratic innovations, where citizens can participate as individuals, with assembly democracy, which strengthens organised civil society. One important aspect of democracy-driven governance concerns the digital commons, and the digital sphere will increasingly be the new battleground against the expansion of algorithmic capitalism.

The book provides many insights on the contested space to advance democracy, showing how social movements and citizen participation continue to play a crucial role in furthering the cause of critical theory: to challenge incumbency and demonstrate the possibility of other worlds.

The book launch is on 7^th June 2023, at the University of Birmingham and on Zoom – register here.

Sonia Bussu is associate professor of Public Policy at INLOGOV. Her main research interests are participatory governance and participatory action research. Over the years, she has led research and published on participatory and deliberative processes, community engagement, coproduction of public services, and participatory research ethics.

Lessons from literature for local government

Professor Catherine Staite LLB, MBA, FRSA

No man is an island entire of itself: every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

As well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

When every week seems to bring news of yet another major failure of governance in a local authority, some members and officers in other councils will be fearful that the same fate will befall their own council before too long, while others will be confident that all will be well for them.

When we look at the notable governance failures that have occurred in recent years, we see a very complex picture. Causes of failure are many and varied, ranging from the absence of the most basic controls to ambitious but risky money-making schemes. Some patterns are visible in all the complexity, including, failure to listen to officer advice, engaging in commercial activities without the requisite skills and knowledge, weak financial controls and opaque decision-making processes.

Councils need both strong rules, about finance and behaviour and strong public service values. Constant vigilance and honest collective self-reflection are vital to ensure that decision makers are independent, transparent, accountable, behave with integrity, have a sense of shared purpose and focus on outcomes. Ask yourself – are our informal and formal governance arrangements fit-for-purpose? If not, where might the weaknesses lie? Look at your structures. Are your Constitution, Codes of Conduct and Standing Orders up-to-date? Is your organizational structure robust? Are your s151 officer and Monitoring Officer on the senior management team and do they report directly to the Chief Executive? Then look at your systems. Are decision making processes clear? Can projects be started without the right sign-off? Can officers exceed their authority without consequences? Last, but by no means least, take a long hard look at organizational behaviour. How do leading politicians and officers respond to being challenged? Is bad behaviour rife but undiscussable?

It’s important to avoid complacency. Most of the members and officers leading and managing councils that have failed to uphold the best standards of good governance either thought what they were doing was fine, or that they could get away with it. Sometimes those who are part of an organization are the last to notice how the patterns of weak governance and bad behaviour, which have become so familiar that they cease to be noticed, will eventually lead to their downfall. Even when officers can see that their council is not going to able to balance its books or manage its risks, it can be difficult to speak up if members do not want to listen and it can be career limiting when a bullying culture prevails. Although statutory officers have statutory powers and duties, they are will not be protected from retaliation if they are perceived to be raining on the parade of colleagues and members who, because of ambition or political expediency, have lost sight of what good governance looks like. The statutory protections that attach to senior roles are not proof against bullying or actions amounting to constructive dismissal. The power imbalance between members and officers remains significant because while members may lose positions of power, or even their seats, officers risk losing their livelihoods and even their careers.

Those members and officers who consider themselves safe from failure may take some guilty pleasure from the failure of another council, especially if its run by another party. Councils have been encouraged to compete with each other for funding and kudos, so perhaps it’s natural to feel that the standing of better run councils goes up when the reputations of failing councils go right down. That’s a big mistake, for two very strong reasons; failure of one local authority reduces public confidence in local government as whole and it gives central government convincing reasons for not delegating resources and power to a local level. For all that we refer to ‘sovereign’ councils, no council is ‘an island, entire of itself’ and the failure of one diminishes all. When we open the LGC or MJ, to see for ‘whom the bell tolls’ we should hear the message that ‘it tolls for thee’.

Picture credit: Maggie Meng https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowfish2014/

Catherine is a researcher, consultant and coach who specialises in strengthening leadership, improving governance and supporting senior politicians and managers.  She is an independent consultant with Darlingburn, a small consultancy practice and is working with Grant Thornton on local government audit, specializing in governance. She was the Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham from 2011 to 2017.

Local councils must work harder at enabling women to be councillors

Picture: Haringey Council’s 2022 cabinet

Jason Lowther

Local councils can and must do more to enable women to be councillors. Haringey’s new cabinet shows that this can be done, but fifty years after all government elected officials across the UK were finally elected under universal suffrage, new research shows barely a third of local councillors and MPs are women, whereas earlier research showed less than a quarter of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) candidates were women.   This matters not only in terms of democratic fairness, but because politicians’ characteristics impact on public policy.

The research published last week by the Fawcett Society and Democracy Club reflects councillor representation in August 2022 across the UK.  To collect the data, they had to scrape individual council websites since (incredibly) there is no official record of councillors’ gender (or other protected characteristics).  This is because the relevant section of the Equality Act 2010 has still not yet been enacted and in any case as drafted would apply only to candidates in national elections.  This is in contrast to council staff, where the Equality Act applies and has led most councils to capture and publish reasonably detailed assessments of workforce equality issues – as shown by the recent SOLACE / Shared Intelligence report, ‘Understanding and Improving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Local Government Workforce’ which we discussed on the blog last autumn.

The Fawcett Society / Democracy Club results show no party yet has parity of representation between women and men, but some are doing much better than others.   The highest proportion of women is found in the Labour Party (47%) and the lowest in the Conservative Party (29%), the SDLP, DUP, and Ulster Unionist Parties. 

Source: Gender representation on local councils, Fawcett Society and Democracy Club (2022)

At individual council level, the highest proportions of women councillors were found in Haringey (65%), Rossendale (61%), Brighton and Hove (56%), Lewisham (56%), and Southwark (56%).  In contrast, Perth and Kinross, Pendle, Comhairle nan Eileen Siar and West Berkshire each have 15% or less of the council made up of women councillors.

One effect of having fewer women decision makers may be that issues that disproportionately affect women are given insufficient attention.  Policymakers play key roles in promoting status-based policies.

Recent research by Professor Francesca Gains (University of Manchester) and Professor Vivien Lowndes (Inlogov) published in the journal Politics & Gender in 2021 analysed the effect of Police and Crime Commissioner’s gender on policymaking around violence against women and girls (VAWG).  An earlier quantitative phase of their research found that policy prioritisation was linked to Police and Crime Commissioners’ own gender, with female PCCs twice as likely to prioritize VAWG.  Their later research analysed how this difference occurred, identifying ‘seven sets of rules that have shaped policy prioritization in favour of VAWG: the right to make key appointments; the requirement to set policy priorities; the obligation to utilize equalities duties; the power to commit resources; the expectation of partnership working with other agencies; the commitment to hold operational police officers to account; and the maintenance of diverse channels of contact with victims of crime and the wider public’ (Gains and Lowndes, 2022, p. 396).

To improve the situation, the Fawcett Society / Democracy Club report makes recommendations to government, political parties and local councils.  For councils, the key actions are:

• implement parental leave policies, to make being a councillor more accessible to those with caring responsibilities;
• ensure that caring and dependency allowances reflect the real cost of childcare and are accounted for separately from ‘main’ members’ allowance;
• pilot alternative ways of working including online and hybrid engagement mechanisms to enable councillors with caring responsibilities to carry out their duties more effectively; and
• adopt codes of conduct, based on the model developed by the LGA in 2020

Local councils can only be truly effective when they represent the communities they serve.  The Fawcett Society report is a timely reminder that we have a long way to go, but the first steps are clear and practical.

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham

Reference

Gains, F. and Lowndes, V. (2022) ‘Identifying the institutional micro-foundations of gender policy change: A case study of police governance and violence against women and girls’, Politics & Gender, 18(2), pp. 394-421.

Thinking about the Earthquakes in Turkey: A Call for Local Democracy

Picture: FCDO/Russell Watkins

Professor Rabia Karakaya Polat

The earthquakes that took place in Maraş province of Turkey on February 6, together with the terrible destruction they caused, also led to the questioning of state institutions and capacity. An important dimension of the subject is the relationship between central and local governments in the country. These earthquakes and what happened afterwards have been instrumental in questioning the overcentralized structure of the state in Turkey[i]. Discussions centered on why the earthquakes were so devastating[ii] as well as the inadequacies in the post-earthquake response[iii].

In Turkey, the authority to issue city planning and zoning permits belongs to the central administration. The authority to carry out urban transformation processes in existing settlements also rests with the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, which is the relevant ministry of the central government. Therefore, the possibilities of municipalities to make cities earthquake resistant are very limited. The authorities of municipalities, such as controlling and licensing the buildings against earthquakes, are not used effectively enough.

Turkish people have witnessed that the excessively centralized structure also hindered the post-earthquake rescue efforts. It was not possible for local actors to take the initiative and act. The lack of timely mobilization of local capacity increased the loss of life. It is very important that not only local governments, but also civil society mobilize in such crises. However, there was a process in which non-governmental organizations and volunteers carrying out aid campaigns were also targeted[iv]. In a televised speech to the nation, President Erdoğan complained about critical news and declared that he planned to hold critical voices to account. Later, access to Twitter was throttled while rescue operations were still underway. The government claimed that it did so to prevent “disinformation”. Some government actors and their supporters also raised concerns about the extent to which public support and fund-raising has been directed at civil society organizations like Ahbap, rather than the government’s own relief organization, AFAD.

In fact, we have witnessed such challenges to local actors in the face of complex and multiple crises by the central government before. For example, during the coronavirus pandemic, the efforts of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to collect aid were stopped and the donations amounting to 6.2 million liras collected in the bank accounts were confiscated and transferred to the central government bodies[v]. The 3.5 million lira aid collected by the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality was blocked. The solidarity campaigns of municipalities were evaluated by President Erdogan as “the logic of being a state within a state”[vi]. Determining the policies and practices related to the pandemic from a single center instead of being shaped according to local conditions increased the negative effects of the pandemic on the society.

Municipalities were also left alone in the refugee issue, one of the deepest crises Turkey has experienced recently. Even municipalities with a refugee population of up to a quarter of their own population did not  receive a penny of additional support from the central budget[vii]. Moreover, municipalities do not know what to do about refugees, as there is no clear legislation and coherent policy in this area. While the discourse and policy towards refugees shifts from hospitality and religious solidarity to ‘voluntary’ return, municipalities are forced to cope with this uncertainty[viii]. Despite this, they develop and implement creative and entrepreneurial projects in cooperation with civil society to meet the needs of refugees and integrate them into society[ix].

The European Charter of Local Self-Government[x], signed by Turkey in 1992, obliges the parties to implement the basic rules that guarantee the political, administrative and financial independence of local governments. Despite this Charter, which provides for the recognition of the principle of local self-government in domestic legislation and, if possible, in the constitution, trustees appointed from the center serve instead of those elected[xi]. At the local elections on March 31, 2019, the HDP (Peoples Democratic Party) won 65 municipalities in the Kurdish-majority provinces. While six of the elected mayors were not given their certificates of election, trustees were appointed by the central government to 3 metropolitan, 5 provincial, 45 district and 12 town municipalities. While the municipalities are under such tutelage in regions where Kurdish voters are concentrated, a politically motivated judicial process hangs like the sword of Damocles over the head of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s elected mayor[xii].

Earthquake is one of the realities of Turkey. However, the strict centralist structure and the authoritarian regime, which further increases its negative impact, prevent local initiatives, resilience and solidarity not only in earthquakes but also in all kinds of crises that arise today. Complex crises such as pandemics, mass migration and climate change that we have faced in recent years and will face in the future are far from being problems that a single actor can deal with at a single level. It is not possible to deal with these crises without vertical cooperation between local, national and international levels of government and horizontal cooperation networks between state and non-state actors such as civil society organizations.

Although we can see the damages of over-centralized administration most clearly in times of crisis, the cost of not having resilient and participatory local government that meets local demands is much greater than we think. Local governments cannot be ‘local’ enough because they are financially dependent on the center and because of the arbitrary and partisan practices of the central government. If this earthquake is to be a start, taking big steps to strengthen local democracy should also be a part of it.

Rabia Karakaya Polat is a professor of political science at the Department of International Relations at Işık University (Istanbul). She recently completed a British Academy-funded joint research project, with Prof. Vivien Lowndes, analysing local refugee policies in Turkey. She published numerous articles in journals such as Security Dialogue, South European Society and Politics, Citizenship Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, Government Information Quarterly, Local Government Studies and Journal of Refugee Studies. Currently, she is working on refugee integration policies at the local level.

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[i] Cemal Burak Tansel (2020) Reproducing Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Turkey: Urban Governance and State Restructuring in the Shadow of Executive Centralization, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Routledge, 88-103

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/podcasts/the-daily/turkey-buildings-earthquake-construction.html

[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/erdogan-turkey-earthquake.html

[iv] https://www.mei.edu/publications/turkeys-government-prioritizing-politics-over-policy-its-earthquake-response

[v] https://www.duvarenglish.com/turkish-govt-confiscated-millions-collected-for-covid-19-victims-by-istanbul-municipality-news-60396

[vi] https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/04/turkey-erdogan-goodness-claims-may-backfire-amid-coronavirus.html

[vii] https://inlogov.com/2021/01/08/no-powers-no-funds-how-municipalities-are-working-creatively-to-address-the-needs-of-syrian-refugees-in-turkey/

[viii] Vivien Lowndes & Rabia Karakaya Polat (2020) How do local actors interpret, enact and contest policy? An analysis of local government responses to meeting the needs of Syrian refugees in Turkey, Local Government Studies, 48:3, 546-569

[ix] Rabia Karakaya Polat & Vivien Lowndes (2022). How does multi-level governance create capacity to address refugee needs, and with what limitations? an analysis of municipal responses to Syrian refugees in Istanbul. Journal of Refugee Studies, 35(1), 51-73

[x] https://rm.coe.int/european-charter-of-local-self-government-eng/1680a87cc3

[xi] https://bianet.org/english/world/259590-council-of-europe-finds-appointment-of-trustees-in-turkey-contrary-to-international-law

[xii] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/14/turkey-court-convicts-istanbul-mayor-ekrem-imamoglu