This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners from around the globe to examine the current roles of and future trends in local government structures and mechanisms in 16 different federal and federal-type countries. In doing so, this volume explores pressing topics such as the institutions of local government, constitutional recognition, financial management, intergovernmental relations, political culture, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the role of local government in federal systems. Contributors to this volume provide a timely and comprehensive account of the integral role local governments play in federal countries and offer fascinating perspectives on how these roles may change as individual federal systems evolve. These individual analyses are contextualized in a comparative perspective in order to gain a holistic understanding of the challenges and opportunities of various local government dynamics in different regions around the world. This is an open access book.

Federal models of government have shaped history and demonstrated how diverse people can live together and govern together in relative harmony. The Forum of Federations Handbook of Federal Countries 2020 builds on the previous 2005 edition and offers a much-needed update to this signature resource in comparative federalism. Outlining every federal country in the world, each chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the history of federalism in its specific country, the constitutional nature of federalism, and recent historical dynamics. As new countries have joined the Federal ranks, this handbook brings readers up to speed offering an authoritative look at both the older federal countries as well as new federal countries like Nepal. The Forum of Federations Handbook of Federal Countries 2020 is an essential resource for academics, researchers, university students, libraries, history and governance teachers, politicians and civil servants, and casual observers of federalism.

This open access handbook compares fiscal federalism arrangements in eleven federal/ decentralized countries. Each chapter examines an individual country, laying out its constitutional design as relates to fiscal powers and the division of those powers between levels of government. Specifically, the analyses consider powers of taxation, spending, regulation, and more. Focusing on Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Italy, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, the contributors provide a fascinating account of how federal countries are confronting the traditional challenges of conflicts over division of fiscal powers while also coping with the ongoing challenges of globalization and citizen empowerment that arise from the information revolution. As a companion to the Forum of Federations Handbook of Federal Countries 2020, this volume considers how relationships and roles in different orders of government are being reshaped, and shows how local solutions inspired by global principles help strengthen government accountability and improve citizens’ quality of life. This is an open access book.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Teaching Federalism presents innovative ideas for teaching a wide variety of key concepts of federalism and federal-country cases. Each chapter introduces a topic, explains its place in federalism research, and provides learning objectives, pedagogical tools, and questions for class discussions, student essays, and examinations. Evaluation and reading suggestions are included as well.

In this book, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Irene Lungo-Rodríguez lead a transdisciplinary team of experts to advance our understanding of wealth in Latin America. Combining conceptual discussions with empirical research, they analyze characteristics of wealth, and the implications for inequality. Three thematic sections provide a unique overarching structure to understand the economic, social, political, and cultural complexity of wealth. Questions examined include: What economic, institutional, and structural factors contribute to the excessive accumulation of wealth? What political dynamics promote the concentration of wealth and power? What type of social, political, and economic relations are generated in these contexts of extreme wealth concentration? What socio-cultural processes contribute to legitimizing and reproducing wealth? What are the local, regional, and national socio-ecological effects of these dynamics? Wealth, Development and Social Inequalities in Latin America provides thought-provoking reading for students and researchers alike who wish to look beyond the Global North for answers on the importance of studying wealth.

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of local government in federations. It fills the gap in current legal research and positions local government in federal studies through the lenses of comparative law, adopting a more nuanced approach to local government. The book considers the shortcomings between the black-letter constitution and its operational rules. Whether (and how) the regime of local government is implemented is more relevant than its formal-but-ineffective recognition. The comparative survey discloses the variety local institutions take in different federal contexts. Divided into three parts, the book comprises chapters investigating local government in systems that, to various degrees, have been examined and classified as federal. Scholars throughout the world have examined the federal-local connection in aggregative federations, (the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Austria), devolutionary ones (Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Italy, Spain, the UK, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the Russian Federation), as well as in federations beyond the West, where federalism-as-a-colonial-legacy has undergone a process of reinvention affecting the federal-local connection (South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia; St. Kitts and Nevis; United Arab Emirates; and Pakistan).

A distinctive feature of urbanization in the last 50 years is the expansion of urban populations and built development well beyond what was earlier conceived as the city limit, resulting in metropolitan areas. This is challenging the relevance of traditional municipal boundaries, and by extension, traditional governing structures and institutions. "Steering the Metropolis: Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development,” encompasses the reflections of thought and practice leaders on the underlying premises for governing metropolitan space, sectoral adaptations of those premises, and dynamic applications in a wide variety of contexts. Those reflections are structured into three sections. Section 1 discusses the conceptual underpinnings of metropolitan governance, analyzing why political, technical, and administrative arrangements at this level of government are needed. Section 2 deepens the discussion by addressing specific sectoral themes of mobility, land use planning, environmental management, and economic production, as well as crosscutting topics of metropolitan governance finance, and monitoring and evaluation. Section 3 tests the concepts and their sectoral adaptations against the practice, with cases from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe.

An exploration of the origins, structure, and change of twelve federal constitutions.

This report offers a comprehensive overview of decentralisation policies and reforms in OECD countries and beyond. Sometimes called a “silent” or “quiet” revolution, decentralisation is among the most important reforms of the past 50 years. The report argues that decentralisation outcomes – in ...