A Decade of improvement for local government
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The theme of this year’s Commonwealth Local Government Conference was Improving local government: the Commonwealth vision. This theme is fundamental to all of us working in and with local government, but particularly so in the current economic climate where councils are having to once again look at how they can tighten their purse strings while they are facing greater demands with less income - doing more with fewer resources.
The conference was held in Freeport, Grand Bahama, hosted by the Government of the Bahamas and the councils of Grand Bahama at the Our Lucaya Conference Centre. More than 550 local government ministry, association and council representatives from 48 countries attended the conference. Previous conferences set out Aberdeen Agenda and Auckland Accord as to the kind of local government we want to strive to achieve: local democracy and good governance for effective services to respond to the needs of the local community and strong local leadership to drive development and support local communities. This conference builds on these previous outcomes, with speakers and delegates calling for local government to continue to improve as part of a broader process of development. Jamaican Minister Robert Montague summed up what is needed as a shift in attitude to include the public as important partners – a shift he called ‘business unusual’ to encompass improving service delivery, improving revenue streams, increasing community dialogue, finding new partners and leading from the front.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who submit articles to this journal from 31st March 2014 for publication, agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Open Access Citation Advantage Service). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (ie. a copy of a work which has been published in a UTS ePRESS journal, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the UTS ePRESS publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
d) Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.
For Issue 13/14, and all issues before, the following copyright applied:
Authors submitting a paper to UTS ePRESS publications agree to assign a limited license to UTS ePRESS if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication. This license allows UTS ePRESS to publish a manuscript in a given issue. Articles published by UTS ePRESS are protected by copyright which is retained by the authors who assert their moral rights. Authors control translation and reproduction rights to their works published by UTS ePRESS. UTS ePRESS publications are copyright and all rights are reserved worldwide. Downloads of specific portions of them are permitted for personal use only, not for commercial use or resale. Permissions to reprint or use any materials should be directed to UTS ePRESS via the journal's main editor, Alison Brown, journal@clgf.org.uk