The Politics of Self-Governance by Eva Sorensen & Peter Triantafillou

Author:Eva Sorensen & Peter Triantafillou [Sorensen, Eva & Triantafillou, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317020073
Google: hTOrCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29442710
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Table 6.2 Status of empowerment provisions

5. Implications for self-governance: The Los Angeles experience

The effect of the reform on self-governance has been mediated by neighborhood council capacity for action. Given that neighborhood councils voice community preferences to downtown policy makers, issues of representative legitimacy are central. It is difficult given the complexity of Los Angeles and the relative newness of the city to determine the complex question of substantive representation, whether these emergent councils actually ‘act for’ their constituents (Pitkin 1967). What is evident, however, is they do not appear descriptively representative of the city. In terms of neighborhood council accomplishments the experience is mixed. A number of neighborhood councils are demonstrating community-level accomplishments in such areas as advising on land use policy, facilitating service delivery, and supporting community events such as neighborhood beautification projects and youth activities. Others continue to struggle with procedural problems, personality conflicts or lack of strategic direction. In sum, the basic problems of collective action exacerbated by the difficulties of negotiating across ethnic and class divides have hindered the ability of neighborhood councils to develop sufficient institutional resources to be of use to the elite networks involved in entrepreneurial management. In the political realm, neighborhood councils have experienced many more successes, but these vary greatly over time and geography, and ethnic and class divisions.

The city’s existing political institutions and administrative norms have not, moreover, adjusted to the creation of neighborhood councils. We find widespread resistance to adopting the reforms due to the fact that elected officials and administrators felt that these reforms were imposed from outside and that they posed potential risks to existing sources of influence and power in the city. Through electoral politics a number of avowedly pro-neighborhood council members have been elected to the City Council, they as of yet have failed to become a ruling majority.

As a result, neighborhood councils appear to be replicating the very entrepreneurial politics that motivated their creation, inasmuch as they are strongly oriented toward the issues of growth and development in Los Angeles. Their meeting agendas emphasize land use and development much more heavily than service delivery or city policy making. They do not however appear to be developing the types of vertical networks that will allow them to develop greater partnership with downtown policy makers and elites. To date they do not report, and are not perceived, to have much influence on the broader politics of growth in City of Los Angeles. Most of their influence on development appears to be sporadic, and to depend heavily on neighborhood council capacity, and on the degree to which their local City Council member is supportive of their involvement in land use issues. In this manner, neighborhood governance in Los Angeles appears to reinforce Berry, Portney and Thomson’s findings from smaller cities, that neighborhood entities are influential primarily with respect to localized planning and development issues and have little citywide impact.

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