ABSTRACT
Waitakere City, well resourced in first world New Zealand, may seem an odd destination for a book on Poverty Reduction and impoverished governance. Obviously, we have reasons. First, New Zealand is a place where unprecedented reign has been given to the governmental reforms seen in previous chapters. Arriving first were both the radical decentralizations and fragmentations of NIE, and the sharpened rational accountabilities of NPM. This radical decentralizing and marketizing phase (1987-1998) became in New Zealand a period that ‘history will record as a fundamental revolution in the manner . . . governance functions’.2 As we will see, NIE and NPM reforms pluralized and undermined territorial governance, while imposing regimes of vertical but market-ready accountability that would long con-
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by re-embedding marketized services in the quasi-territories of community and local partnerships. In this, Waitakere City’s experience is regarded not just in New Zealand as exemplary.
