ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1990s, which brought extremely important changes on the Central and Eastern European (CEE) political scene, was also a decade of a revival of local democracy in the region. The complementarity of urban leadership and community involvement is a key concept for this book. This chapter provides an introductory discussion of the meaning of these concepts for CEE countries. It starts with a discussion of contextual variables – institutional setting of local governments (in which special attention is placed on the position of formal local leaders – mayors), and of the nature of central-local relations. After a long period of a very centralist and undemocratic mode of governance, the devolution of power and strengthening of local government seemed to be a natural direction to many politicians. But what model of local government has appeared from these changes, and are the generalisations and theories used to describe local governments and democracy in West-European societies useful to understand processes in Central and Eastern Europe?
