2021 is the year of municipal elections. Many dark clouds hover over Portuguese society, if we think of the heavy consequences of the post-pandemic period.
This is also the reason why our small municipalities urgently need to gain more muscle, nervous system and territorial collective intelligence to anticipate and face this huge nightmare.
Therefore, at this distance from the elections, I think a brief reflection on the future of local government and local political society is perfectly justified.
1. What we already know
We already know that, from a structural and organizational point of view, the country looks like an invertebrate animal that lacks a backbone.
On the one hand, centralism, on the other, localism. A bipolar country, therefore.
In the language of the nomenclature of territorial statistical units, the country is based on NUTS I (central) and NUTS IV (local) levels. On the contrary, the country should be based on the intermediate pillars, the NUTS II (CCDR) and NUTS III (CIM, inter-municipal communities) levels, in order to create density, muscle mass, nervous system and spine to tackle major problems post-pandemic crisis and the biggest crisis ever in Portuguese society.
We already know that heavy macro trends will always affect the structure, functioning and performance of local government, if they are not radically altered. We are getting closer and closer to the demographic winter with inverted demographic pyramids, demographically moribund counties and no-future home counties.
We take huge, totally random and unpredictable risks if we don't have truly effective, multi-level governance. Economic cycles are getting shorter and shorter, asymmetric shocks are more frequent and more intense, municipalities fall into the emergency and intensive care bank more and more, as is now being observed.
We already know that, in the face of such a national crisis, no local problem will be solved only at the local level and we also know that this fact can generate saturation of the municipal public space, fatigue and indifference of citizens, a growing abstentionism and progressive loss of quality of the public space.
We also know that we will most likely witness the exhaustion of the municipal financial model, a financial model based on transfers and indebtedness, as it will be subject to a great investment effort to meet the requirements of the post-pandemic crisis and recovery and development programs approved in Brussels. It is important to remember that it is the programs that elect and reconfigure the territories and not the other way around.
2. The power system of the municipal power
The local government power system is organized around three power distribution subsystems: two electoral constituencies (municipal and district), three levels of public administration (AC, AR and AL) and three levels of party-political organization (municipality , district and national).
Political parties, the privileged operators of the system, try to optimize its implantation, its power system, its distribution of seats, in this three-dimensional system.
In 2021, 47 years after the 25th of April, in many Portuguese municipalities, local power is confused with local power and local politics were, in a way, captured by the suffocating omnipresence of the city council. In other words, in many municipalities we are dealing with a true State-Local. In the bipolar state that we are, the power system of local power can be described as follows:
– The deconcentrated system works in a vertical and hierarchical mode, from top to bottom, so the only original legitimacy is the autarchic;
– The system creates many simulacra of participation in order to function and create habituation and routine;
– The system works in a utilitarian logic of needs and compensation, of balance of flows, regardless of its effectiveness, efficiency and effectiveness;
– The system does not have sufficient multi-scalarity due to the low autonomy of the intermediate levels;
– The system suffers from an excess of institutionalization, sometimes centralist and sometimes localist, which aggravates its bureaucratic vice;
– The system produces a lot of rhetoric about innovation, but fixed geometry territories are generally more conservative;
– The system creates a necessary and convenient breeding ground for its reproduction, without affecting its reputation too much.
Arrived here, the great question of the coming years is whether, given the dimension of the post-pandemic economic and social crisis, we will witness the encystment and narcissism of this autarchic power or, rather, its liberation through the creation of new socio-organizational formats in which the autarchic power is a peer pair in close articulation with the other powers, business, university, cultural, media, associative.
What is at stake is the construction of a more collaborative local economy, more municipal federalism and digital platforms that support these new communities.
I remember that we are going into a new period of execution of the European funds and nobody seems to be questioning the reasons why the territorial asymmetries have worsened in more than thirty years of local and regional investment.
Remember that, whenever there is a period of economic adjustment, we see a devaluation of the territory's assets.
This will be our main problem, now and in the future, the destruction of the productive tissue whenever there is a period of adjustment. In this context, there will be no territorial development policy that can withstand new periods of macroeconomic adjustment in the post-pandemic period.
Above all, I am thinking of that immense sea that is the great country in the interior, of these remote rural towns that grow every day, starved of hope and enterprising people. We need more and better collective territorial intelligence and a great deal of planning, programming, planning and implementation.
3. The future of local government
For local authorities, the near future will take place in three major plans. First, on the technological and technical-administrative level, with incremental changes that depend above all on available financial resources.
Three great vectors will affect the technical and technological structure of local government as we know it today: dematerialization, disintermediation and automation.
These functional changes will substantially modify the technical-administrative structure and the social capital of local authorities.
In the background, what we could designate as the community ecosystem that surrounds the local government and that refers to the associative universe and the collaborative networks that link this associative universe.
Here, the aim is to create the digital and collaborative complex of local administration, interacting more with citizens and their organizations, most likely on platforms of outsourcing very diverse and imaginative.
By the way, I believe that the expression local autarchy will go out of fashion for invoking autarchy, hierarchy and authority. For now, the only certainty we have today is that there will be more plurality and diversity of local powers and that this new reality will gradually change the face of municipal power as we know it today. By the end of this decade, local power will be unrecognizable. For the better, we hope.
The third plane, which we could call the institutional ecosystem, is a large gray area where the main transactions between levels of government and administration take place, which the literature has established with the designations of multilevel governance and multiscalarity.
Here we are talking about municipal federalism, the various forms of regionalization, national and cross-border, the changes in European policy on territorial cohesion and even state reforms.
In summary, the future of local power management will depend a lot on the organization of the local political society, in particular, the associative universe and collaborative networks, secondly, the municipality's internal policy and, thirdly, the articulation of multilevel government and administration in the form of supportive and welcoming environments.
4. The democratic square of local power
Talking about the future, about the October 2021 elections, in the middle of the post-pandemic period, is not an easy task, which does not mean that it is not necessary and, in this case, even essential.
And it's not easy, right from the start, because each one of us, in the face of a crisis, manages expectations differently in the way we anticipate and look forward to the future. And it is not easy, yet, to talk about the future because the speed and contraction of space and time have reduced the past and future to the dimensions of the present.
The consequence is immediate, we are overloading the daily management tasks, as everything becomes urgent in such a congested context. Administrations lose clairvoyance and discernment, the municipality runs the risk of becoming an instance of last resort, of social assistance and protection.
In a rather severe context, I want to believe that municipal politics could be organized around four democratic types or democratic squares:
– Upward vertical relationships (AR and AC), representative democracy;
– Vertical downward relationships, citizens and interest groups, participatory democracy;
– Horizontal relations with other municipalities, municipal federalism, associative or intermunicipal democracy;
– Extra-municipal or extra-territorial relations, network territories with variable geometry, platforms, collaborative democracy.
These relationships configure a new political, institutional and community ecology of the local power of the future. There is, obviously, a relative autonomy of the municipality regarding this coordinate system, but the essential of the politics, from and politics will be determined by this matrix of coordinates.
From this democratic square, it is possible to imagine a much more structured and complex model of regional and local government in search, above all, of more territorial collective intelligence that will be sorely needed to face the post-pandemic period.
5. Municipal administration in the XNUMXst century
Everything we've already said contemplates a more open, more cosmopolitan, more connected and collaborative city. Here is a description of its main features:
– A more communitarian and federalist municipality, with parish unions, associations of municipalities and inter-municipal communities, practicing multilevel governance in multiple forms and modalities of rescaling;
– A more interactive municipality agreeing with groups of citizens on innovative practices of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and crowdlearning and new working communities;
– A more itinerant municipality in the provision of personal household services, with a view to creating a genuine solidarity economy in the municipality and between municipalities;
– A much greener and more circular municipality in terms of idle resources, creating a dynamic collaborative economy with regard to their reuse;
– A municipality much more focused on the creative and cultural economy in everything related to the management of intangible and symbolic resources;
– A much more interactive municipality with regard to its internal structure, which will translate into a new functional relationship front office versus back-office (Shop citizen);
– A municipality with a parinterpares, for example, in terms of territorially smarter public-private partnerships;
– A more innovative municipality in terms of financial engineering, for example, with a funding much more diverse and imaginative with all your partners;
– A more transparent municipality with regard to accountability municipal;
– A municipality with a digital greenway for all age groups.
Final grade
The year 2021 will be a decisive year for our collective life. We cannot go back to the old normal, the devastating consequences of the pandemic crisis are not compatible with electoral entertainment, so the municipalities have an opportunity here to make a genuine political pedagogy instead of trying to seduce us with the narcissism of future candidates.
The effort of municipal and inter-municipal programming and planning with regard to the regional operational program will be so demanding that all public and political agents will need the maximum of foresight and discernment.
Therefore, I am writing this text nine months in advance of the next election, as I sincerely hope that it will serve as a pretext to feed some reflection.
Moreover, it should be read in conjunction with the article published in the Sul Informação, on January 29, entitled «Valuing the interior, contracting with the CCDR and the CIM».
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