Bulletin n. 2/2010
October 2010
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
  • Leach Steve
    The Audit Commission's View of Politics: A Critical Evaluation of the CPA Process
    in Local Government Studies , Vol. 36, issue 3 ,  2010 ,  445 - 461
    The Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) process introduced in the wake of the Local Government Act 2000 was in essence a managerial tool applied to a political environment. An analysis of the Commission's first tranche of CPA reports reveals a particular perspective on the role of politics and parties in local authorities which raises issues about the Commission's competence and legitimacy to make such judgements. Composite pictures of the 'good political authority' and the 'poor political authority' can be drawn up, which display a degree of political naivety and a failure to recognise the differences between political and managerial logic. It is concluded that the CPA process should have taken the political culture of an authority as a 'given' (at least in the short term), and evaluated the performance of the authority's management in the political circumstances in which they had to operate. Finally the role of the CPA process in contributing to the government-led pressures for depoliticisation of local decision-making is examined, with a particular concern about the substitution of the concept of 'the good of the area' for the different priorities and visions of different parties.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016