ABSTRACT
People are defining and celebrating their local identities in many communities around the world. Communities are creating links with counterparts in other nations not only for the sake of curiosity about other peoples and cultures but also to develop more global perspectives, contacts and to use these concepts to better compete in the world economy and ‘global village’. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War, the increasing complexity and tempo of human and political life has caused the widely studied promotion of non-national government agencies into actors in the international sphere. This increased decentralisation and devolution of national decision-making to the subnational level has resulted in the construction and maintenance of more complex bilateral and multilateral political and economic partnerships. This tendency towards self-rule and political independence by more communities runs parallel to the formation of large multi-national economic alliances. Increased communication through improved technologies is simultaneously allowing the world to develop a huge global economy with many increasingly powerful smaller components and the breakdown of the nation-state as the dominant level of analysis. Against this background of changing levels of analysis and emphasis on economic investigation, this work will draw attention to the evolving links that have been developed by subnational governments in Australia and the People’s Republic of China.
