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Abstract The article considers the evolving nature of the relationship between cities and states in Europe from the point of view of vertical rather than horizontal decentralization. The article comments on the influence of theories of network governance and new institutionalism on perceptions of the role of elected politicians, using the example of the UK Warwick Commission report. The article closes with a brief case study of Birmingham regarding the roles of individuals in the relationship between Council and city and the influence of central government in the ‘regime change’ that occurred in Birmingham at the end of 2015. Key words: decentralization, governance, networks, institutionalism, strategy, leadership, cities.

Introduction: Decentralization and the State Decentralization in Europe has a complex and ambiguous history. Under the Roman Empire city autonomy provided the basis of ‘government without bureaucracy’ (Garnsey and Saller, 2014), although this later gave way to the centralization that later characterised the Byzantine state. The resurgence of trade in the Middle Ages saw the emergence of powerful free cities (Pirenne, 2014) whose walls protected defined their legal autonomy (Lepage, 2010). However, it was centralization, including the suppression of urban autonomy that, in turn, became a defining characteristic of the European nation state (save certain exceptions, such as Switzerland), as it emerged from the medieval era (van Creveld, 1999:104-117). Geopolitical competition drove states to construct a central bureaucracy (Ertman (1997) and those, such as Hungary and Poland which had developed political decentralization before constructing a central state, were to lose their independence (1997:31). The rise of the European Union, with its polycentric nature (Ziolonka, 2008:475) marked a dilution of the centralised Westphalian nation state and this larger ‘imperial’ size unit created the opportunities for viable selfgovernment of smaller units (Colomer, 2007: xi). In a Europe apparently no longer subject to geopolitical

competition, decentralization became synonymous with the European democratic idea, notably through the Council of Europe’s European Charter of Local Self Government of 1985. Decentralization has, however, never been a constant of European governance but has fluctuated according to circumstances. Thus, after 2008, with state finances under strain, a trend to re-centralization could be observed (CEMR, 2013). Europe’s postwar, and post-Cold War, enthusiasm for decentralization contributed to its adoption – combined with US-style fiscal federalism – as a recommended feature of good governance by the World Bank, although the promise was not always borne out in practice – Andrews and de Vries’s fourcountry study (2007) found claims that decentralization broadened participation to be largely unfounded and Grindle (2007) cautioned about the need for realism about the consequences of decentralization. Part of the problem was lack of clarity about the distinction identified by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004:85) between administrative and political decentralization and between internal and external decentralization. The earlier work of Horvath (1997) on administrative decentralization as a necessary technical precondition of political decentralization, concluding that fragmentation is not

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synonymous with decentralization, as the latter requires integration, confirmed the significance of this distinction in the (then) newly-democratised states. Decentralization is about Hierarchy, not Networks The idea of external decentralization, transferring functions beyond the boundaries of the state – associated particularly with the governance school of Rhodes (1996) is rejected by Marcou (2008) in a polemical ‘postface’ to the otherwise upbeat UCLG world report on decentralization: ‘decentralization does not exist outside the state but it ceases to exist even within where local authorities are no more than the executors of policies determined by higher authorities’ (2008:304). In other words, the governance theory is a blind alley (as the involvement of non-state actors does not necessarily involve transfer of power) and attention should be re-focussed on asymmetries of power between central and local states. Although the idea that the state had been hollowed out and replaced by non-hierarchical, selfmanaging horizontal networks had become something a quasi-orthodoxy despite criticism or lack of empirical support (see for, example, Marinetto (2003) Davies (2011) but there has been a gradual acceptance that fragmentation and networks may co-exist with centralisation of power, and that networks do not necessarily mean the end of hierarchies, and may even be an instrument of the latter - hence the idea of ‘meta-governance’ orchestrated by the state (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010). From the above we may draw out the following points. Firstly, decentralisation does not primarily or necessarily mean the strengthening of the horizontal as opposed to the vertical axis, through networks or participation. It may still involve traditional zero-sum hierarchical relationships, or inter-level vertical competition and that the greater the asymmetry in favour of the upper level, the less decentralization may be said to be present. This may appear a statement of the obvious but the obfuscatory effects of post-modern post-hierarchical, post-governmental theory mean that sometimes the obvious needs restating. Of course, horizontal collaboration and participation is important, especially in administrative systems characterised by centralized, functional structures. However, in some Western governmental systems there is a different danger, that of centralization proceeding behind a camouflage of horizontal governance. Decentralization and Bringing Politicians Back In If the existence of hierarchy has had to be salvaged from the network perspective, the significance of local

politicians may also need rescuing from the neomarxian structural models of urban politics that became influential during the 1990s and which were to some extent subsumed within the network governance perspective. For example, Stoker (1998) celebrated the progress of the discipline of urban politics by deriding how studies from the 1970s would have started their analysis of ‘who governs’ with a consideration of who the elected and appointed officials were, whereas subsequent analysis was more concerned with class and interests than with ‘observable power’ (1998:120). Paradoxically, this period, in which academic interest was seen to shift away from the nature or role of political representatives and towards deeper economic and community structures, was one in which the strong elected mayor model became popular in both academic and policy circles in the UK, with Gerry Stoker as one of the most vocal advocates of the change. At first sight this may seem odd – after all, as McNeill (2013:101) comments, mayors are the definitive ‘individualized agents’, in a field where analysis has emphasised the role of structure and networks rather than individual politicians. A possible explanation was that the enthusiasm for elected mayors in some quarters was proportional to their contempt for the existing system of elected representatives. The idealised figure of the mayor is therefore invoked as a kind of messiah in contrast to the already existing politicians who are uniformly assumed to be inadequate or, at best, incapable of agency. This rejection of individual agency and, by extension, any commitment (on the part of elected representatives) to problem-solving or effectiveness, may be seen as implicit in network governance theory and in the neo-marxian structural theory both of which in different ways remove agency and significance from elected representatives. The same has arguably been true of the new institutionalist perspective as a whole. More than two decades ago, Donaldson (1995) rejected new institutional theory as being based on the unsupported assumption that organizational structures and behaviour had no causal connection with effectiveness, competitive pressures or rationality on the part of those working in organizations (1995:1237). A similar argument was expressed, the following year, by the original ‘old’ institutionalist, Selznick (1996) who, while seemingly seeking to build bridges with the new institutionalists by stressing how much old and new had in common, nonetheless concluded with a re-statement of his view that ‘social phenomena and institutional adaptation and persistence are produced in and through the responsive and problemsolving behaviour of individuals’ (1996:274).


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Selznick sees some new institutionalists as following a postmodern zeitgeist, leading to exaggerated claims, hostility to coherence and too little attention to context (1996:275). What was clear to Selznick and Donaldson about the invidious effects of new institutionalist thinking on organizational theory in the mid-1990s was, it may be argued, observable in discourses of decentralized governance and urban politics over the next two decades, the common thread being an unwillingness to recognise the significance of individual agency or the possibility that any objective, as opposed to ideological, imperative might inform that agency. Curiously, the implicit contempt for the local actor leads to an over-emphasis on the omniscience of central government. Decentralist Saxons and Centralist Normans In case the argument expressed here may seem exaggerated, there is a document which demonstrates to perfection the attitudes described above. The document concerned is the summary report of the Warwick Commission (2012) on elected mayors and city leadership. There are probably two critical points in the development of local government in the UK. First, it has progressed incrementally with little strategic direction except in so far as the central government has been forced at various points in time to address the byzantine local structures and processes that have embodied the consequences of this reactive incrementalism – the ‘Saxon heritage’: as long as ‘the locals’ kept their house in order then London was content to ignore them – only when disease, squalor or riot infringed upon the metropolis did Whitehall decide to ‘do something’ about the ‘locals’. Second, the state has often attempted to realise, but seldom achieved, its aim of centralising control and its own authority for almost a thousand years – since the Norman invasion of 1066. The history of local government in the UK, then, can be described as one rooted in these two dichotomous traditions: the centralising fetish of the state – the veritable ‘Norman Yoke’ – bolted on to the decentralised chaos of the Anglo-Saxon heritage (2012:38). Far from being an ironical ‘aside’, this curious statement is actually included in the Executive Summary of the Report. It is not that the statement has no basis in historical reality. On the contrary, it refers correctly to the modernisation of local government which started in the mid-nineteenth century through central government’s imposition a series of sanitation reforms that brought considerable public health benefits to the populations. As brilliantly recounted by Hunt (2004:196-225), whose work the Report’s

authors cited, these reforms were indeed resisted by advocates of local self-government who presented themselves as bearers of the Saxon tradition – the decentralised, diffuse and participatory political traditions of England from before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Normans being seen as the bearers of state centralism and bureaucracy. What is odd is that this Dickensian picture is still regarded as relevant when local government changed out of recognition in the century that followed. The spectacle of a centralising, absolutist state presenting itself as embodying enlightenment and progress, opposed by a romantic ideology of local self-government as embodying the traditions of ‘the people’ of a given country since time immemorial - is not specific to England or the United Kingdom but has been played out in many countries throughout Europe since the American and French Revolutions, notably if not earlier. At base, it reflects and unresolvable tension between bureaucracy and community, principles that present both advantages and risks and which are complementary but cannot be fully reconciled. The is, of course, what makes the study, or indeed the management, of local government, more than a mere technical exercise. The same may be said for the relationship between politics and administration at national level – the two principles complement each other but the tension between them cannot be reconciled, nor can or should the boundaries be conclusively defined - see Svara (1998, and Kettl (2006). The ‘Saxon-Norman’ standoff referred to in the Warwick report and researched more extensively by Hunt also approximates to Tonnies’ distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, except that, as we have also implied above regarding politics and administration, these concepts are opposites as ideal types not as empirical categories – on the ground the two principles are inter-woven (see Mellow, 2005). Curiously,), the Warwick statement appears to recognise only the reactionary aspect of localism and shows no awareness of De Tocqueville’s vision of the progressive role of local civil society or recognition that the opposition of centralization and decentralization represents a contradiction within liberalism (see Karotinsky, 1975) rather than between distinct ideologies. Bringing the Bureaucracy Back In What is more curious, for anyone familiar with the reality of British local authorities is the Report’s implied dichotomy between a central bureaucracy and local byzantine chaos. Leaving aside the fact that the byzantine system of government was in fact quite


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centralized, the defining feature of British local authorities is their large size and their characteristic highly departmentalised and professionalised structures (the latter albeit weakened by thirty years of ‘new’ public management). For this reason, as Pinch (2006:36) correctly observes, public choice theory – which may be seen as reflecting a US local context of relatively weak institutions in a network of interest groups and stakeholders, has less appeal in relation to UK local government, where Weberian or neoWeberian analysis has more explanatory power. The same may also be said for Stone’s urban regime theory, which starts from the assumption (Stone 1993) that governing capacity is not captured through the electoral process, whereas, given the bureaucratic strength of the UK state, both local and central, and mainstream political parties throughout much of the post-1945 period, is a less obvious starting point than the balance of power between central and local agents. As discussed above, in UK local government, the key issue in decentralization is not state and non-state relations but the power asymmetry between different levels of the state. In the course of a lively and multi-faceted critique, the Warwick report does come round to consider the Weberian nature of local government, albeit in a highly negative form, as part of a problem of placeless and a faceless professional elite (although it is not clear why this is specifically a local government problem). The report closes the following statement: Ultimately directly elected mayors may be a way of answering the most important question at the heart of governance: what is the purpose of politics? If politics is about how we mediate our individual and collective conflicts then we had better pay some attention to reinvigorating the body-politic: politics is too important to be left to politicians (2012:38).

and administration, centralization and decentralization can be transcended through the concentration of executive power in the hands of an executive mayor is a powerful cocktail – it lay behind the introduction of executive mayors in Moscow and St Petersburg (see Campbell, 1992), and one that should be applied with care. Birmingham: Change

From Regeneration to

Regime

As an institution traditionally ruled by committees, until the Cabinet reforms of the 2000, and the earlier informal emergence of the post of Leader of the Council (the leader of the majority group or largest party), British local government history is short on heroic individuals. There is however one figure that is invariably mentioned whenever the topic of local leadership or civic entrepreneurialism is broached, and that is Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Mayor of Birmingham 1873-6. Unusually for a British local politician Chamberlain the transition to national level politics and was a major figure in national and international politics in the period 1877-1906. Chamberlain was the driving force behind a series of innovations that were to earn Birmingham, in 1890, its celebrated description as ‘the best governed city in the world’, according to a visiting American journalist (Ward, 2005:148). Chamberlain’s mayoralty (which he followed up over many years as a member of parliament) has been praised as the ‘greatest mayoralty in English history’ (Marsh, 1994:50).

The last line draws a familiar distinction between ‘us’ (people whose interests need to be mediated) and ‘them’ (the politicians). As such the report reflects the impatience with ‘established’ politicians that has become such a feature of UK, European and Western politics in recent years. Existing politicians are by definition incapable of mediating individual and collective interests, whereas a mayor (who is somehow assumed not to be an existing politician, perhaps not really a politician at all) is apparently able to do this, almost definition. What is striking is not so much the argument advanced – which is not without justification – but the ease with which the assumptions that underlie this argument are made.

Chamberlain, a local industrialist, did not simply bring business principles to city management, but was a pioneer in the type of symbolic politics that met the challenge of appealing to a mass electorate after the voting reform of 1867. Chamberlain would walk through Birmingham greeting working class voters by name, and, with his characteristic monocle, projecting a ‘larger than life’ image of himself. As such, he greatly extended the role and significance of the mayoralty, engaging in high profile projects such as the creation of a gravity pipeline to bring clean water to Birmingham from Wales. He municipalised the city’s gas supply and used the proceeds to create a city hall with a museum attached, to show that governance and culture were inter-connected, and a slum clearance and urban renewal programme. Later, he was to be the founder and driving force behind the foundation and construction of the University of Birmingham, setting the standard for ‘redbrick’ municipal university campuses in Britain.

Contempt for elected politicians (however justified in specific cases) and the idea that the competing imperatives of community and bureaucracy, politics

Hunt (2004) describes how Chamberlain, impressed by the achievement of Haussmann’s urban planning in Paris, sought, somewhat ambitiously, to remodel


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Birmingham along the same lines, with the new Corporation Street created as a Parisian boulevard. The Warwick report, characteristically, cites Chamberlain’s machiavellianism in expanding the mayoral role and the extent to which his achievements were possible due to lack of interest on the part of central government. Hunt, however, gives a more fitting epitaph: ‘Chamberlain’s greatest achievement was to position the elected Council as the motor and repository of civic pride. Urban identity was no longer commensurate with the charitable voluntarism of merchant princes…it belonged to the city’s municipal institutions’ (2004: 265). There is no space here to relate why that tradition fell into abeyance for much of the next century, during which local authorities grew larger and more bureaucratic but under closer central supervision. When resources became scarce in the 2000s, localism returned to the agenda and in 2010 the Conservative minister, for local government, Eric Pickles, cited (Guardian, 3 October, 2010) the example of Joseph Chamberlain in advocating ‘home rule’ for England’s cities. Calling for the spirit of Joseph Chamberlain is one thing, welcoming it when it appears is another. Birmingham had already, more than two decades previously seen a regeneration programme led by the City Council with methods and results that led to the Council, in 1991, being referred to by the Financial Times as ‘the inheritors of Chamberlain’ (see Leather, 2001). The changes in question had been brought about by unlikely but balanced team of local government entrepreneurs who had come to power in Birmingham in 1984 when Labour had regained control of the council - unlike cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle, Birmingham did not have a quasipermanent Labour majority but tended to alternate between Labour and Conservative/Liberal control (this may have provided added incentive for innovation). As with Chamberlain, the role of individuals, was crucial. The Leader of Birmingham City Council (1984-93), Richard Knowles, the leader (later Sir) was a traditional tough Kent trade union official, with high recognition and strong populist appeal among traditional Labour voters in the city. His new ally, the Chair of the Economic Development Committee, was Dr Albert Bore (later Sir), a Leftwing Scottish lecturer in nuclear physicist with a strong grasp of economic strategy. In contrast with other Labour councils that were at that stage embarking on head-on confrontation with government over illegal budgets, Knowles and Bore had come to the realisation that without investment from business, the local authority could not deal with the effects of economic crisis. Birmingham in the mid-1980s was

facing economic meltdown due to the collapse of employment in traditional sectors related to the automotive industry, and the policy response from central government was muted. However, like Chamberlain, Bore believed this required state leadership not laissez-faire capitalism. Knowles and Bore convened a strategy conference, symbolically at Highbury, Chamberlain’s former residence, to agree principles that would guide the strategy. These were that 1) the council had to lead and take responsibility for the city’s economic survival (not a statutory council responsibility at that time) 2) that public investment should be used to leverage, rather than substitute for, private investment and that 3) the focus should be on city centre enhancement as a means of attracting investment in business services, rather than throwing resources into traditional sectors or dispersing them across the city’s neighbourhoods. The strategy was carried with the kind of consistency that the academic literature on policy implementation generally does not recognise as possible. The collaboration between Knowles (who kept the core voters reassured) and Bore (who was able to win the trust of business investors) was mirrored by a (then) unusual degree of co-operation between the Planning and Economic Development Departments and Committees of the City Council. So that investors were drawn into a coherent regeneration and land use strategy. It was impressive that the strategy was maintained despite there being no political short term gains (most voters were sceptical or hostile at the start) nor did the city council participants benefit materially from the investments made, yet they were able to maintain the strategy until its success finally became widely accepted in the late 1990s, more than ten years from the start. Through re-modelling the city centre, Birmingham had become established as a leading international conference and business services centre – an objective regarded ten years earlier as hopelessly unrealistic. In the early years the changes had required substantial public investment but the leveraging effect meant that projects required less and less public participation and from the mid-1990s projects typically involved the Council and landowner and planning authority, with the investment entirely from the private sector (or central government in the case of transport infrastructure). By the early 2010s, Birmingham was becoming one of the main destinations for business investment in Europe and was rated one of the top ten cities in the world by the Rough Guide (BBC News, 17 December, 2014). By this time however, two challenges had appeared. Firstly, other cities, notably Manchester and Liverpool, were applying similar ambitious strategic management to their own development and, in the


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case of Manchester, profiting from a stronger base of industrial small business than Birmingham, although receiving less external private investment. Secondly, central government from the early 2000s had become increasingly supportive of Manchester and the North West as a second city - being more clearly in the North and further from London this made political sense both for the Labour Party seeking to maintain its regional strongholds and, later, for the Conservatives, to show they were a national, not only Southern party.

by KPMG as in the top six investment cities in Europe (Financial Times 22 May, 2015) and the city was subject of a glowing report in the Financial Times (21 September, 2015) under the headline ‘Second City First – Birmingham trounces its Rivals’.

Bore remained committed to the Highbury strategy principles but would have to wait until 2012 to return to power in the city, by which time the effects of financial, rather than economic crisis constrained the city’s ability to act. Reductions in government financial support caused Bore to make a muchpublicised statement in 2013 about ‘the end of local government as we know it’(Guardian, 30 October, 2012). A number of public services issues in education and social services that had been developing under the previous Conservative-run council (and this it might be said) not subject to strong criticism from the government were now, under the Labour-run Council subject to high-level government criticism.

In the meantime, however, the Government, and especially the powerful Chancellor, George Osborne, who represents a North Western constituency, not far from Manchester, were giving great emphasis to the policy of devolution to city-regions and in particular the creation of a ‘Northern powerhouse’ based on Manchester, with substantial devolvement of government powers and funding, on condition that the city region be presided over by a metro-mayor, an elected executive mayor. It was also alleged that the Chancellor specifically did not want Birmingham, rather than Manchester to aspire to second city status in this way (Birmingham Post 12 February, 2015) and this view was borne out when the Chancellor appeared to have intervened to ensure that the President of China visited Manchester, not Birmingham, against the initial Chinese government preference (Birmingham Post, 20 October, 2015). At this point, in October, 2015, the Local Government Minister, Greg Clarke, stated in Parliament that the £8bn devolution package for the West Midlands (the Greater Birmingham area) could be delayed until there was a change of leadership in Birmingham (Birmingham Post 17 September, 2015). This brought matters to a head, and a leadership challenge was made by Birmingham Councillor John Clancy (who had been making annual leadership challenges without success), but this time, with more candidates joining the challenge, Sir Albert Bore announced his resignation on 14 October, 2015. Tributes were led by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who stated that Birmingham was a world class city thanks to Sir Albert Bore (Birmingham Mail 14 October, 2015), a view which was reflected in most reactions to the resignation.

The former head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, was sent by central government to report on the management of Birmingham, and his report contained many criticisms of the leadership – although one of these, the blending of the roles of councillors and officers (this had been a feature of Bore’s administration) was regarded as a problem whereas, for the reasons given earlier in this article, they could be regarded positively. The Kerslake Report (2014) also implied that the economy of Birmingham was falling behind what it regarded as better run cities – Manchester, Sheffield and others, when the evidence does not confirm this – Manchester has performed better in growth of value added whereas Birmingham has performed better in attracting investment – rated

What was striking about the ‘regime change’ in Birmingham City Council was that, these statements of recognition of Bore’s unparalleled contribution to the city’s strategic development over several decades, there was remarkably little reaction to the rare spectacle of a city leader being ousted as a direct result of (very likely premeditated) Government action. Secondly, the criticisms made of Sir Albert’s personal leadership style (which was very much in the elected mayor tradition) seemed odd given the policy of promoting personalised mayoral leadership. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that it was disagreement over the Government’s preferred approach to setting up the devolved metro authority may have been a factor in the ‘regime change’ carried

Manchester’s own entrepreneurial flair with sporting events did much to overtake Birmingham in visibility. Thus, while Birmingham remained unassailable in its popularity with the property and business tourism sectors, its wider visibility began to lag behind Manchester. It was also Birmingham’s misfortune that the Labour Government’s Iraq War of 2003 led directly to the loss of control of the City Council to a conservative and Liberal coalition who tended to be less strategic in their approach to city development than Labour who were, since 2000 led by Sir Albert Bore. Despite Bore’s popularity with business, antiIraq feeling among Birmingham voters was to lose Labour control of the city (Financial Times 5 June, 2004).


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out at Birmingham, and that the Metro Mayor role may be seen as primarily a co-ordinator from central government’s point of view, rather than a genuinely autonomous local entrepreneur. Here we are reminded

of the significance of the Marcou quote cited earlier, that decentralisation is about the state, primarily, and that it is not present where an official is simply carrying out government policy.

References:

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