Apologies for cross-postings. Some list members might be interested in the following second call for papers.
Conference: RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, 31st August to 2nd September 2011, London.
Session: What is happening to local government? From local government to localism?
Organisers: Nick Clarke, University of Southampton and Allan Cochrane, Open University.
Sponsors: the Political Geography Research Group and the Urban Geography Research Group.
Format: Two sessions, five 20-minute papers in each, or one session of papers and one panel session (depending on abstracts and expressions of interest received).
For a time, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was hard to escape geographical debates around the nature of local government and locality, whether expressed in terms of local social relations, uneven development and local dependence, theorisations around the dual state, or the search for a new urban Left. Since then, however, little sustained attention has been paid to these issues, whether because the local political arena has offered less opportunity for active engagement or because academic and theoretical debates moved on to other concerns.
Contemporary political developments have now forcibly reintroduced the local onto the agenda. The UK's Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government (elected in 2010) has explicitly incorporated 'localism' into its legislative programme.
This proposal is intended both as a response to that move, considering its implications for processes of local governance, and as an opportunity to review the debates of the past in the light of the localist claims being made within the programme of the Right, in contrast to those made in the past around the possibility of some sort of local socialism (or, more recently, for localism as the basis for a politics of transition to a low carbon economy).
In this context, therefore, the sessions will focus on a series of key concerns and questions:
1) Conceptualising local government. Is this simply the continuation (or end game) of moves to enabling authorities, from government to governance, to a dual welfare state or two-nation society, to ambulance authorities, to governance that is not best described as 'local'? Do we have here something different and/or new? How new is this latest 'new localism'? How local?
2) Central government rhetoric and practice. How is localism being mobilised by the coalition government to enrol and create sympathetic publics? What are the implications of the coalition government's legislation, policy, and programmes in this area?
3) Local government practices and responses. How are the reforms affecting different localities? How are different local organisations responding to them? What possibilities are being opened up/closed down (e.g. for service provision, local democracy, or alternative forms of local politics)?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to both Nick ([log in to unmask]) and Allan ([log in to unmask]) by 4 February 2011
Dr Nick Clarke
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geography
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton SO17 1BJ
Tel. 02380 594618
Mob. 07708 099056
Web: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/geography/staff_profiles/academic/nc1.html
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