ABSTRACT
Many municipalities in Europe have found themselves in a situation where they are required to engage in speedy decision-making, quick problem-solving and cost-effective service provision (often under the guise of New Public Management) whilst simultaneously giving citizens and civil society a stronger role in governance processes and empowering them as active agents in participative and collaborative decision-making. Against this background, the chapter explores how tensions between aims of effective administration and democratic accountability manifest themselves in government/governance processes in a peripheral town in eastern Finland, Lieksa, which has been hit hard by economic and financial distress as a result of a combination of structural change and territorial disadvantage. This chapter traces the process of managerial and processual change in the municipality and unpacks the balancing act between achieving effective administration on the one hand and democratic accountability on the other. The identified recent local government processes placed within the tension field of democratic accountability versus administrative efficiency in Lieksa include the aim to gain more local capacities and autonomy, to establish a more effective and open/transparent city administration, to repatriate decision-making power from the regional/sub-regional level to the local level and to take a proactive approach to the changing role of municipalities in light of ongoing regional and social/healthcare reforms in Finland. The chapter concludes by positioning the findings in the wider debates on the dynamics of local autonomy and spatial justice in Europe and by offering some outlook on the potential management of complex problems faced by remote and shrinking municipalities.
