Reform how our cities are governed to manage urgent urban challenges: report

Reforming metropolitan governance in Australian cities is essential to effectively addressing pressing urban issues such as action on climate change, coordinating population and urban development growth, and minimising spatial inequities and suburban sprawl, new AHURI research has revealed.

‘The interconnected nature and increasing complexity of Australian metropolitan governance raises critical questions about the existing political fragmentation and multiplicity of boundaries, functions and government services that often replicate and compete with one another’, says report author Associate Professor Andrew Butt from RMIT University.

The research, Local government co-ordination: metropolitan governance in twenty-first century Australia, undertaken by researchers from RMIT University and University of South Australia examines the role of local government in city-wide governance including cooperation with other governments and sectors, and whether an increased role could create more responsive, effective and democratic outcomes.

‘The interconnected nature and increasing complexity of Australian metropolitan governance raises critical questions about the existing political fragmentation and multiplicity of boundaries, functions and government services that often replicate and compete with one another’, says report author Associate Professor Andrew Butt from RMIT University.

‘This overlapping of responsibilities has reignited calls for city-wide governance structures. Whether these take the form of a metropolitan government, a coalition or a network will need to be negotiated in every city region and metropolitan area, as will the way in which boundaries are drawn.’

The report found that state governments are the dominant player in current city governance and there is a trend towards taking away planning powers from local government and making them the ‘line manager’ in a process driven elsewhere. This also plays out in the different state planning reforms and changes to the Local Government Acts with their emphasis on fiscal responsibility and procedural, rather than genuinely political, action.

‘What people consider important in terms of urban public goods and services can vary substantially as a result of differences in culture, geography, demographic and socio-economic status, says Professor Butt.

The research questions the common assumption that creating a large, overarching efficient government entity is the best way to govern a city’s development, finding that for any larger scale governance structures to be sustainably successful they have to be accepted as legitimate by citizens and all levels of government.

‘What people consider important in terms of urban public goods and services can vary substantially as a result of differences in culture, geography, demographic and socio-economic status, says Professor Butt. ‘If bureaucrats simply deliver services to passive citizens who are not actively engaged in co-production, the level and quality of these public goods and services will be seriously reduced.

On 24 March 2021, AHURI hosted a Research Webinar, The role of local government in Australian cities, with Prof. Andrew Butt, RMIT University and Liz de Chastel, Senior Policy Adviser, Australian Local Government Association. The webinar delved further into the research. A copy of the presentation slides and a video recording of the webinar is available through a link on our website.