Making Governance Work for Small Communities: Increased Governance Legitimacy through Efficient Local Decentralisation

This thesis considers the effect of decentralisation within the local level, on the legitimacy of governance. From the literature, it becomes clear that factors like community cohesion and partisan identity are relevant in several related processes, but also that the exact relationship of interest has not been researched sufficiently yet. These factors are therefore treated as conjectures and investigated in a two-phased research design. The exploratory first phase develops a hypothetical causal mechanism based on interviews in the single-case study of the EMD Bítem. It shows a positive relationship between local decentralisation and governance legitimacy, mediated by more direct control and moderated by governance efficiency and community cohesion. The explanatory second phase tests this mechanism in an intermediate-N systematic comparison of most different cases. It finds confirmation for the hypothesis in new contexts, especially for the direct control and governance efficiency...Show moreThis thesis considers the effect of decentralisation within the local level, on the legitimacy of governance. From the literature, it becomes clear that factors like community cohesion and partisan identity are relevant in several related processes, but also that the exact relationship of interest has not been researched sufficiently yet. These factors are therefore treated as conjectures and investigated in a two-phased research design. The exploratory first phase develops a hypothetical causal mechanism based on interviews in the single-case study of the EMD Bítem. It shows a positive relationship between local decentralisation and governance legitimacy, mediated by more direct control and moderated by governance efficiency and community cohesion. The explanatory second phase tests this mechanism in an intermediate-N systematic comparison of most different cases. It finds confirmation for the hypothesis in new contexts, especially for the direct control and governance efficiency factors, but still lacks internal validity, for which it develops a quantitative research design. The study concludes that, especially in specific rural contexts, local decentralisation can indeed be employed to make governance systems more legitimate.Show less

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Making Governance Work for Small Communities: Increased Governance Legitimacy through Efficient Local Decentralisation