The European Benchmark of Local Public Services
Climate, biodiversity, resources …
The inventory is more than worrying. Urgency and long-term collide, solutions will be systemic or will not be.
The Chief Executives of the larger local authorities are well-positioned to understand it, and they act, but the magnitude of the necessary changes is still difficult to imagine.
Brussels, home to many international institutions, is a Region that is still facing various challenges: increasing poverty, significant population growth, low employment rate … The Brussels Region is also full of opportunities, seized by the public authorities, to become an ambitious capital, safe, with “soft” mobility, with accessible housing, pleasant to live in. The complexity of the distribution of competences pushes the various institutions to find synergies and collaborations, in order to propose to the citizen the best possible services.
Transversal issues, energy and ecological transition, participatory approaches, public and private stakeholders’ interaction, “managerial revolution”, growth crisis are some of the ingredients that make the making of the city more and more complex. They impose new strategies as well as an overall rise in competence, by community agents, elected officials and structures dedicated to development operations. It is the arduous task of Chief Executives to achieve the matching between public policies, projects and a “participative” organization necessarily adapted to the particular context of their territory.
The economic and environmental crisis accentuates the difficulties of the medium-sized cities and the peri-urban or rural territories, widening the gap between these territories and the metropolises. Should we attribute some responsibility to these? How to better spread the benefits of the dynamics of the metropolises? Is merging with the departmental councils a solution? The meeting provided a beginning of answer, highlighting the need for contextual, differentiated and agile approaches.
Mobility in all its forms is a key challenge for the governance and development of urban areas. It raises issues of how to reconcile the demand for mobility and sustainable development, how to seize the opportunities offered by the digital and collaborative economy, rethink the categories of individual vs collective and public vs private, coordinate mobility services at the wider urban level, manage resources, and so on.
Large cities, on the front line in dealing with social exclusion and the influx of migrants, do not have adequate means to handle this issue. The time has come to consider migration as a permanent phenomenon, calling for specific public policies. A short-term, urgent approach is the worst solution.
A seminar organized by Bordeaux Metropole and the BEST network in cooperation with the city of Barcelona.
France’s recent reforms concerning territorial governance have set in motion a host of simultaneous projects requiring the reorganization of local authorities – a task made even more complex by the fact that relationships between different authorities are also impacted. Nonetheless, local authority chief executives see these reforms as a powerful engine for progress.
Human resources at large local authorities is an immense field in which issues of cost (or value?), efficiency, skills and quality of public service intersect. Finding the right management system is crucial but difficult to master in the framework of regional civil service.
Innovation and funding, two topics that are related in many ways. Administrations are innovating to simplify administrative procedures provided that the cost of the public service is also substantially reduced. For communities facing increasing financial pressure, innovating means imagining new revenue, reducing costs, or moving towards new sources of funding.