Governance Matters with Peter McKinlay

Look at local government in other countries and you find a whole lot of new terms coming into the language. People talk about ‘participatory budgeting', ‘co-design' and ‘co-production'. Behind the jargon there is a real shift taking place. Councils and their communities are experimenting with ways in which decisions can really be taken locally – meaning residents can have real choices about what happens in their place.

Partly, its councils recognising people do want to have a say. But it's also councils understanding if they work closely with individual communities, they learn much more about how to spend ratepayers' money effectively. There are some great stories about communities telling councils how to save money and get better results at the same time. A common example is communities telling their councils' engineers they don't actually need to do the work the asset management plan requires – perhaps they can delay it, perhaps it is not needed at all.

The real challenge is how to make it happen. Councils too often talk as though sharing decision-making with communities means extra cost, delay, and loss of authority. Look at where it's been done well and you see the opposite is the case. Good councils know how to support networks of community organisations, residents associations and so on. It's a mix of capability development, devolving the power to make decisions over minor local investment, and working collaboratively on other decisions which affect the community.

It's a great way of giving people a real opportunity to shape their own places, reduce the burden on ratepayers, and strengthen local democracy. It's also one of a number of strategies demonstrating there are better options than amalgamation for getting better outcomes from local government. My next column will explore some of the others.