Against the background of unease at the increasingly loose and conflictual relationship between citizenship and governance, this book brings together rich, ethnographic studies from EU member states and post-Communist and Middle-Eastern countries in the Mediterranean Region to illustrate the crisis of legitimacy inherent in the weakening link between political responsibility and trust in the exercise of power. With close attention to the impact of the ambiguities and distortions of governance at the local level and their broader implications at the international level, where a state's legitimacy depends on its democratic credentials, Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance initiates a comparative discussion of the relationship between established moralities, politics, law and civil society in a highly diversified region with a strong history of cultural exchange. Demonstrating that a comparative anthropological analysis has much to offer to our understanding, this volume reveals that the city is a crucial arena for the renegotiation of citizenship, democracy and belonging.

Against the background of unease at the increasingly loose and conflictual relationship between citizenship and governance, this book brings together rich, ethnographic studies from EU member states and post-Communist and Middle-Eastern countries in the Mediterranean Region to illustrate the crisis of legitimacy inherent in the weakening link between political responsibility and trust in the exercise of power. With close attention to the impact of the ambiguities and distortions of governance at the local level and their broader implications at the international level, where a state's legitimacy depends on its democratic credentials, Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance initiates a comparative discussion of the relationship between established moralities, politics, law and civil society in a highly diversified region with a strong history of cultural exchange. Demonstrating that a comparative anthropological analysis has much to offer to our understanding, this volume reveals that the city is a crucial arena for the renegotiation of citizenship, democracy and belonging.

Drawing on fundamental ideas about the relationship of citizens to the public sphere, Richard C Box presents a model of `citizen governance'. Recognizing the challenges in the community governance setting, he advocates rethinking the structure of local government and the roles of citizens, elected officials and public professionals in the twenty-first century. His model shifts a large part of the responsibility for local public policy from the professional and the elected official to the citizen. Citizens take part directly in creating and implementing policy, elected officials coordinate the policy process, and public professionnals facilitate citizen discourse, offering the knowledge of public practice needed for successful `citizen gover

This volume addresses the relationship of citizenship and public management in Europe. After 15 years of state reform, it is time for an overall discussion of the theoretical and empirical impact and limits of New Public Management, as one of the latest reorientations in public administration, on the practice of citizenship. It points out the tension between a focus on improvement of state bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the involvement of citizens in the co-production of policies on the other. It also points to a fundamental change that is taking place: the imortance of state apparatuses for the development and sustainability of viable societies is being de-emphasized and special attention to "governance" is now taking over the central place, that for so long has been occupied by attention to "government". Through the eco-production of public policies by citizens and public authorities working together, a new civil society is emerging. The book highlights the fact that the re-invention of the citizen is of crucial importance to public administration practice, as well as to the various public administration disciplines in Europe.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

This unique collection of original works examines the relationship between citizen and state. Nine insightful contributions range from a transnational analysis of the corrosive influence of wealth elites on the functioning of the state, to models of state and citizen governance, to contrasting philosophies of citizenship.

Government bailouts; negative interest rates and markets that do not behave as economic models tell us they should; new populist and nationalist movements that target central banks and central bankers as a source of popular malaise; new regional organizations and geopolitical alignments laying claim to authority over the global economy; households, consumers, and workers facing increasingly intolerable levels of inequality: These dramatic conditions seem to cry out for new ways of understanding the purposes, roles, and challenges of central banks and financial governance more generally. Financial Citizenship reveals that the conflicts about who gets to decide how central banks do all these things, and about whether central banks are acting in everyone’s interest when they do them, are in large part the product of a culture clash between experts and the various global publics that have a stake in what central banks do. Experts—central bankers, regulators, market insiders, and their academic supporters—are a special community, a cultural group apart from many of the communities that make up the public at large. When the gulf between the culture of those who govern and the cultures of the governed becomes unmanageable, the result is a legitimacy crisis. This book is a call to action for all of us—experts and publics alike—to address this legitimacy crisis head on, for our economies and our democracies.

When a person is not recognised as a citizen anywhere, they are typically referred to as ‘stateless’. This can give rise to challenges both for individuals and for the institutions that try to govern them. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship breaks from tradition by relocating the ‘problem’ to be addressed from one of statelessness to one of citizenship. It problematises the governance of citizenship – and the use of citizenship as a governance tool – and traces the ‘problem of citizenship’ from global and regional governance mechanisms to national and even individual levels. With contributions from activists, affected persons, artists, lawyers, academics, and national and international policy experts, this volume rejects the idea that statelessness and stateless persons are a problem. It argues that the reality of statelessness helps to uncover a more fundamental challenge: the problem of citizenship.

A fundamental rethinking is under way about the roles of government, citizens, and community organizations in public policy. Can government be reconstructed to make public policies more responsive to citizens and thus more effective? This challenge is apparent in the activist policy agenda of the Clinton administration, which supports national service programs, government-voluntary collaborations, and community-based development projects. Public Policy for Democracy is an important and timely contribution to the current discussion of how to get people more involved in their own governance. In this book, contributors urge policymakers and policy analysts to promote a more vigorous and inclusive democracy by incorporating concerns about citizenship in their craft, rather than strictly emphasizing efficiency and effectiveness. The authors provide insight into how the social construction of politics affects the recipients of the policies and the public in general. They call attention to how policies reinforce negative stereotypes of some groups, such as welfare recipients, and often lead to political alienation and withdrawal. In addition, they discuss how polices using "clinical reason"—a term borrowed from medicine and used as a way to classify people—are increasingly applied to nonmedical situations, such as domestic violence, to restrict individual power and legitimacy. The authors argue that much needs to be done by the government itself to improve policy design and empower all citizens to participate in the democratic process. They identify concrete strategies for policymakers to enhance the role of citizens without sacrificing program effectiveness.

Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.