Urban leadership and community involvement

Institutional rules play a major role in the conceptual framework described in Chapter 2, both in terms of ‘context variables’ and the ‘institutional design of local systems of governance’. It is therefore essential to develop a clear understanding of different types of rules and how they can be recognised when analysing actual governance structures and the behaviour of actors within these structures. This chapter deals with the institutional analysis of a complementarity of urban leadership and community involvement. The following section provides a short description of the ‘Institutional Analysis and Development’ (IAD) framework (Ostrom et al. 1994) (with a possible operationalisation of the key variables described in an annex). This is followed by a clarification of the links between the key forms of democratic legitimation described in Chapter 2 and the variables central to institutional analysis. On pages 47-49, the IAD framework is used to conceptualise the possible roles of leadership in enhancing effective community involvement. At this point the analysis arrives at the core question addressed in this book as a whole (and set out in Chapter 2). How can the simple co-existence of leadership and community involvement become ‘complementary’ in the sense that it maximises the opportunities, and minimises the risks, of interaction and increased interdependency between the two.