Professor Gerry Stoker.

COMMENT

By Gerry Stoker

Leaders at all levels of government need access to both hard and soft power.

Local government systems throughout the world face a particularly sharp version of a difficulty confronted by governments at all levels: having enough power to turn your intentions into realities on the ground.

The key is to recognise, it has been argued in the work of neoliberalism co-founder Joseph Nye, that although you might have a limited amount of hard power – the power of command and incentives – you have a potentially limitless pool of soft power, the power to get other people to share your ideas and vision.

These valuable insights from international relations have been used by Nye to develop a wider theory of leadership. But do they apply to local government?

At first sight the opportunity for local or regional government to use hard power is limited by the sheer scale and complexity of the tasks at hand and soft power is the better option. Local or state-level governments tend to have only modest hard powers of coercion, regulation or economic incentives.

These bodies may be able to do little directly for their citizens to save them from harm or promote development. But they will be able to engage through soft power, optimists would suggest.

Yet I would argue that you need a substantial amount of hard power in order to exercise soft power. Being a place shaper or community governor on its own – without something of substance to offer – places local government on a slippery slope to the sidelines of governing arrangements. Partnerships, quangos and other agencies gain in prominence and elected local government becomes an irrelevance for much of the time.

The United Kingdom, and most particularly England, could be seen as an exemplar of this trend. There is an increasingly desperate rhetoric about a community governance role for local government but limited substantive functional capacity in relation to welfare provision and economic development, and little in the way of identity politics to rest on after multiple reorganisations have created a local government system of a scale and coverage that has, in large parts of the country, little to do with citizens’ felt sense of community.

You can’t win with the losing hand.

Gerry Stoker is professor of political science and co-director of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester in the UK.  He will be a keynote presenter at the ANZSOG Excellence in Local Government Leadership Programme.