ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the merits of the emerging community council 'movement' in Norway. After an inventory of the phenomenon in question, the chapter discusses a hypothesis on the emergence of a new political institution in local level politics, the community council. The chapter argues that the emerging community or neighbourhood councils (NCs) have characteristics that are irreducible to those of small scale municipal government. It also argues that they can also be distinguished from locally based voluntary organizations, as well as from informal or ad hoc community development groups. Locally created and informal community organizations, transformed into sub-municipal, formal councils, are expected to keep their grass-roots profile, putting weight on what unites, and under-communicating partisan cleavages among the local participants. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of the development of an NC system for municipal government and for locality development.
