English local government and the local trap

Neil Barnett

Local Government Studies, 2020, vol. 46, issue 4, 604-621

Abstract: Local government in England faces unprecedented challenges, with ten years of austerity adding to longer-term concerns over its waning influence. Responses so far have involved dismissing local government for more radical alternatives or re-iterating increasingly shaky defences. I argue that resetting the debate around local government requires firstly addressing the meanings we have assigned to the local, which are at presentconstrained by the ‘Local Trap’, and that looking at the English case gives a particularly insightful view of its consequences. I set out the ‘Local Trap’ and identify three ways in which local government discourse is trapped; by assumptions about the ‘naturalness’ of the local; assumptions about its democratic qualities; and an adherence to scaler representations. I then argue that as a consequenceattention is diverted to either local government past or an elusive one to come, before setting out potential pathways out of the trap via engaging more robustly with practice.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2020.1761336

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