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This paper examines accounting practices and legitimacy in Tanzanian Local Government Authorities (LGAs).

It uses data from multiple sources, including interviews, observations and documents, to provide theoretical and practical understanding on how accounting has been practiced and the conditions which sustain its undertaking. It applies a grounded theory method to develop a theory systematically from the raw data.

The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of ‘manipulating legitimacy’. This involved the purposeful and deliberate use of accounting techniques to influence and control (and sometimes even to falsify) the perceived reasonableness of the Councils’ operations. The paper revealed that the effective operations of the Tanzanian LGAs were highly constrained by their context. This had forced the LGAs’ officials to use important accounting practices such as budgeting, financial reporting, auditing and performance measurement, to manipulate the organisational legitimacy, a process which ensured the availability of resources to both LGAs and the individual officials.

The main limitation of the research is that the data was collected from a limited number of local authorities in just one developing country. It is hoped that future research in other developing countries will be undertaken to broaden and deepen our understanding.

The paper identifies the importance of manipulating legitimacy in understanding accounting practices in local government.

This study aims to investigate the use of discretionary spending, especially by incumbents, to win the election and whether incumbents can take more advantage of such spending than the new local government heads. This study also examines the political monitoring effect in suppressing discretionary spending. By using panel regression on 225 local governments during 2013–2016, the results indicate that political motive positively affects discretionary spending proportion ahead of the election. Following the public choice theory that although local government heads act on the interests of voters, their primary motivation is personal interest. Incumbent’s victory does not affect total discretionary spending and the financial assistance expenditure/transfer but has a significant positive effect on grant and social assistance spending. It generally supports Corruption Eradication Commission’s allegations of “returning the favor” is carried out by elected heads in one year following the election. But, it shows that incumbents are more able to utilize grants and social assistance spending than the new local government heads. Political monitoring from the opposition party has proven to have a direct negative effect on discretionary spending proportion. Tracking of the one year after the election should be done to prevent misuse of discretionary spending for incumbent political interests. The results of this study are expected to provide input to regulators to develop more comprehensive regulation, for example, strict sanctions for violations related to accountability for the use of such funds to limit the opportunistic behavior of the local government heads.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

Great Britain is a laboratory for new techniques of public management; it is therefore an interesting place to look at for people willing to get involved in large public organisations. The French ‘institute for local studies’, trains future professionals, selected after graduation or after a working experience, in order to take high positions in local authorities nationwide. Three pairs of trainees belonging to the 2012–2013 group spent two weeks in three local authorities in England, with the purpose of analysing the performance management in these organisations.

British and French scholars dedicated to public organisations provided the six trainees with a global view of local government and reforms in the United Kingdom. After that, each pair exchanged information with the local authority they would visit; during the two weeks they spent there, an officer followed their works. They interviewed numerous professionals, elected members and unionists, attended meetings and events. Back in France, they presented their findings in several documents. The original subject was measuring and managing performance; in fact, the three pairs went farther and looked over many aspects of the organisations’ functioning.

Local authorities are facing important budget reductions and appear fragile; they put forward the idea of resilience to express the necessity of using all their resources to deal with a difficult situation. Elected members have a role of political initiative, but they also focus a lot on control, which is much more developed in Britain than in France; managers experience a very difficult period, with a lot of threats on their jobs, teams and projects. In this context, professional networks are very important; peer review is an interesting example of the role of professional exchanges in the search for new solutions. At last, unions don’t seek conflicts but try to accompany changes, lessening their negative consequences on people.

This work is not an academic one but an approach of the reality of organisations analysed by professionals or future professionals of the public sector, in a kind of ‘peer review’ between different countries. This international dimension is interesting, seeing that few in-depth comparisons between local authorities are made, especially between France and Britain.

The chapter focuses on rural-urban food links in the context of governance. We seek to understand a rural-urban innovator mechanism is emerging through the food system and the renewed question of proximity and relative autonomy in the alimentary supply of this type of space and local society. We present case studies from Paris and Budapest metropolitan rural areas exploring institutional and private actors of governance, their power networks, food and related cultural components of rural-urban relations, the function of food links and the way in which they are governed. We have found several differences in governance methods between the Paris and Budapest metropolitan ruralities. The areas surrounding Paris are characterised by multi-level governance methods. However, an isolated form of rural governance of the rural-urban local food link can be identified in Budapest’s rural areas. Understanding the complex and dynamic interaction of food links and related activities within metropolitan areas offers the possibility of a far greater understanding of the complex and multiple links between sustainability, renewal of social interaction and cohesion.

With continued growth in tourism, demand for guided local excursions, sightseeing, and entertainment has increased rapidly, particularly in European tourist destinations cities. Many touristic sights can often be viewed best from the water. Operators offer a variety of sightseeing cruises on motor barges along rivers, canals, lakefronts, or ports. In many tourist destination cities and around urban heritage sites, however, increasing boat traffic and the associated air pollution from diesel-powered engines have become a local environmental concern. Based on complaints from residents and visitors, several cities have already announced plans for (mandatory) tourist boat emission reductions. Today, electric mobility offers alternative options for safely and conveniently powering commercial tourist boats, that may contribute to mutually beneficial solutions for local operators, tourist visitors, and residents alike. However, the technology is still expensive and new businesses may also face considerable challenges when entering established local competitive tourism markets. Focusing on the local waterways of the city of Berlin, Germany, the authors have conducted a local case study, including interviews with several operators of (electric) tour boats, as well as an initial empirical survey of their tourist customers. The authors point out the viewpoints of the various stakeholders, identify opportunities, discuss constraints, and offer policy recommendations with a view to enhance the sustainability of waterborne transport in tourist destination cities.

While Norway, Sweden, and Denmark share many historic, political, and cultural features, their state systems and public administration exhibit important differences. Likewise, Nordic administrative sciences reflect a significant degree of ethnocentric diversity. Although as a whole, since the 1960s, Scandinavian academic public administration has witnessed rapid growth, an emphasis on local–regional government, and highly sophisticated scientific-empirical research, as opposed to professional training or narrow application of technical–legal methodologies.

Over the past few decades, the subject of governance has come to the fore in many public discussions, notably with regard to reforms of the social protection system. Without entering into various debates the concept has generated, we shall use it in its positive sense (Gilly, Leroux, & Wallet, 2004), to designate all of the interactions between various public and private actors in the elaboration and implementation of public policies to attain shared objectives of general interest (Enjolras, 2008; Le Galès, 1998). Governance thus reflects a change in the forms of collective action – which certainly would qualify as modernisation – and the growing importance granted to management strategies in this change. It also brings out the complexity of the interrelationships between the different levels of decision-making (horizontal and vertical), which might be characterised as ‘poly-governance’ (Eme, 2005). And governance also permits a simultaneous approach to the new territorial, productive and partnership arrangements emerging in response to the different levels of constraints and socio-demographic changes. These issues lie at the heart of the transformations of the welfare state and related policies for rationalising public intervention and stabilising public finances. Studies dealing with welfare mix and welfare pluralism (Evers & Svetlik, 1993; Esping-Andersen, 1999; Ascoli & Ranci, 2002; Pestoff, 2006; Richez-Battesti, 2008) bring out different ways of combining sources of risk protection or other forms of solidarity. Such research reinforces analyses of co-ordination, as well as those of management and decision-making.

Recent theory and research suggests that local relational networks among business organizations play an important role in establishing and preserving a locale's identity. Such networks facilitate the development, dissemination, and enforcement of norms and cognitive frames that guide local business behavior. They also provide a vehicle for the consolidation of local business interests and for the coordination of local business strategic action. We examine the factors that influenced the likelihood that the CEOs of large corporations sat on the board of directors of large locally headquartered commercial banks in the 1960s. We focused on the 1960s because doing so allows us to make use of an exceptional comprehensive data set on the attributes and relationships of large firms and their leaders. We examine connections to commercial banks because these banks played a crucial role in community development in the 1960s. We find that both the class attributes of corporate CEOs (as reflected in their ownership of the firm and their affiliation with elite educational, social, and policy-making institutions) and the organizational attributes of their firms (as reflected in their financial structure, geographic reach, and age) influenced a CEO's propensity to sit on the board of a locally headquartered bank. These results suggest that future research on participation in local relational networks should take into account both class and organizational theories. They also suggest that future research on the class and organizational underpinnings of relational networks should pay closer attention to spatial relations.