Local Government

Well, our research team spent a year looking at the way local government is functioning, talking to the stakeholders, surveying the community and basically we identified three main issues - three main areas of concern when it comes to government at the local level of the town or city. One of them. and perhaps this is the most important one, is that we need to enable citizens. ordinary people, to take more responsibility. As co-authors of their civic lives, they need to be able to determine what kinds of services and facilities they need and also, think about how they can contribute in those areas, how they can become involved. A second area we looked at was how to create a public service- and public servants - who are able to actually support citizens in what they want and need. Now, this should perhaps happen in a more down-to-earth and less bureaucratic way than we've seen in the past. I'm talking about moving towards a more customer-directed approach across the board. Finally. we need to look at the relationships between national government. local government, and citizens, because that has not been functioning as it should. We've had over-directive centralism. and a kind of mistrust has emerged between national and local bodies - and it's the citizens who bear the brunt of this.