Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Modern Research in Management, Economics and Accounting
Year: 2021
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/12th.meaconf.2021.05.281
Adaptation from Government to Governance
William Nti Marfo
ABSTRACT:
According to Hambleton (2003), traditional city management’s long-established practices are being challenged, which has prompted many cities to adapt from government to governance. Consequently, the role and purpose of the city authorities are reshaped to conform to contemporary city management. This signifies the shift from the city government’s central leadership role to a more enabling partnership involving various actors. The challenge now is how the local authorities shift from the top-down government model to collaborative governance, which encourages partnership between private-public and non-governmental agencies. Currently, the business improvement district’s (BIDs) has become an innovative city management model and expanding to many cities due to the traditional city government inability to tackling urban challenges. These challenges are due to differences in priorities, objectives, and strategies between different segments of the urban government, or what Pierce (1993) called “governance gaps” caused by organizational insufficiency and lack of inter-organizational coordination (Weschler 1992). The study aims to understand the business investment zone (BIZ) policy in Amsterdam metropolis to understand why the policy was adopted, how this could be improved and implemented to bridge the gap between the traditional bureaucratic city management and the new collaborative governance. This study examines the BIZ policy’s policy networks within the Amsterdam Metropolis and how these could be enhanced to boost network performance and collaborative governance in the Randstad region. The empirical analysis points to the preliminary conclusion that network structure does matter for the organizing capacities and the policy networks’ performances. This revelation is significant since the knowledge and experiences outlined in this study are likely to be relevant and applicable to other sectors, well beyond those studied.
Keywords: Organization Adaptation. Public-Private Partnership. Governance network. Business Investment Zones. Policy Transfer, Policy network.