Draft:John Stewart (Inlogov)

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  • Comment: Per AngusWOOF's comment, this reads like a combination of an obit and an essay on the subject's work. There are sources cited, but it's unclear if those sources are secondary sources that provide significant coverage of the subject. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:15, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment: another option for disambiguation is (local government), but there are a lot of John Stewarts that are politicians. AngusW🐶🐶F (bark • sniff) 22:49, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment: This reads more like a eulogy. Needs external news sources. Please indicate specifically how his person meets WP:NACADEMIC AngusW🐶🐶F (bark • sniff) 22:32, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

John David Stewart, Professor of Local Government Studies[edit]

Professor John Stewart was a leading UK academic researching local democracy.

Influence on public policy[edit]

The Management of Large Local Authorities[edit]

In 1963, Local Government in London was reorganised to create large powerful councils, with associated local authorities. Under the London Government Act 1963. The first elections for these new councils were in 1966. Similar reorganisations took place in the rest of England in 1972 under the Local Government Act 1972, which put into effect many of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Local Government (the Redcliffe Maud Report) in 1969. The first elections for these new councils were in 1974 in England and in Scotland in 1975 under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1975. The Bains Report (1972) on management and structure advised these new local authorities to replace their systems of separate, professionally-oriented departments with collaborative, community-oriented ‘corporate management’, headed by powerful chief executives who would coordinate the activities of the different departments..[1]


The Financing of Large Local Authorities[edit]

In 1974 the Government set up the Layfield Committee to examine possible reforms. [2], Stewart was appointed to the Committee and it was there that he met George William Jones. The two of them had a significant influence on the report, published in 1976, advocating the case for a local income tax where councils could set their own levels of the tax, to finance the services provided by local authorities, as in many American cities.

Stewart and Jones became one of the great academic partnerships and friendships. They wrote and campaigned for the significance of local government for democracy, writing regularly for the Municipal Journal and on occasion for the Local Government Chronicle over the next 40 years. Their contributions to the analysis and development of local government were the subject of a national conference in 2004, drawn together in their final book, written with Steve Leach, on Centralisation, Devolution and the Future of Local Government (2017).

The Case for Local Democracy and Devolution[edit]

Stewart’s 2004 book[3] argued that local areas have different histories, different challenges, different resources and different traditions. One of their resources is local people, who know the area and can see possibilities for change and improvement. There is no way in which a department of a central government can have this detailed knowledge and commitment[4]: ‘A system of government requires a capacity for differentiation with different organisations, or parts of organisations, carrying out specific responsibilities. But it also requires a capacity for integration to enable different organisations and parts of the organisations to work together in meeting community needs.’[5]


The New Magistracy[edit]

In the 1990s Stewart reflected on the changes of the previous 20 years.[6] Local authorities had all but lost their powers to set their own rates of tax, and become even more dependent on government grants. They had lost powers over schools, housing, the police, probation, the fire service, and much more – which were increasingly run by Quangos with little involvement with local communities. Even basic services such IT, finance and property services were often contracted out, mainly to large national or international companies. Stewart described these as ‘the new magistracy’[7] – harking back to the nineteenth century where magistrates with little local accountability or knowledge were appointed by powerful outside interests. The consequence was a plethora of organisations with responsibilities for local services, many reporting to central government, and no easy way in which their activities could be coordinated or local residents could take democratic responsibility for the services they depended on.

Wicked Issues[edit]

Stewart’s writing on the public sphere began to develop a broader analysis of these ‘wicked problem’ facing the economy, society and the environment which could only be addressed through effective local public management. He argued that the distinctive values, conditions and tasks of management in the public domain were different from those in the private sector, enabling citizens to express their contributions to the life of the community, and out of that plurality enable a process of collaborative choice to resolve dilemmas for the public good: ‘Local government can draw on its own and its citizens’ ideas and aspirations, but this genuinely localist approach cannot be achieved in fragmented and imperfectly accountable structures …. The lesson of the last 40 years is the need for a learning government that welcomes diversity. All can learn from the relative successes and failures of diversity, whereas too often centralism builds uniformity from which all that may be learnt is general failure.’[8] His article on ‘Citizenship and governance: The challenge for management in the public domain’ (written with Stewart Ranson in 1989) was reprinted in a collection edited by Rod Rhodes (1990) of ‘the most significant journal articles in the field of comparative politics in the last 25 years.’[9]

Deliberative Democracy[edit]

Increasingly, this turned to the potential of innovations in democratic practice[10] including ‘consensus conferences’ [11], ‘deliberative opinion polls’, Citizens’ Juries [12] and ‘the informed citizen’. Such practices could strengthen democratic community governance with or without local authority involvement, through participation, voice, deliberation, and collective choice based on consent. [13]


Principal published works[edit]

British Pressure Groups: Their Role in Relation to the House of Commons. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1958

Understanding the Management of Local Government. 2nd edition 1995. Pitman, for the Local Government Training Board. 1978.

Local Government: The Conditions of Local Choice. George Allen and Unwin. 1983

The Future of Local Government (eds., with Gerry Stoker). Palgrave Macmillan. 1989

‘Citizenship and Government: The Challenge for Management in the Public Domain’. Political Studies Vol.37 No. 1 pp.5-24. 1989 (With Stewart Ranson) (Also in R.A.W. Rhodes (ed.) The International Library of Politics and Comparative Government, Volume II, The United Kingdom. Dartmouth Publishing. 2004)[14]

‘The Free Local Government and Experiments in the Programme of Local Government Reform’. In C. Crouch and D. Marquand (Eds.) The New Centralism. Oxford: Blackwell. 1989 (With Gerry Stoker)

Leach, S. (1989). Strengthening Local Democracy? The Government’s Response to Widdicombe. In Stewart and Stoker (eds.) op.cit

The Future of Local Government. Macmillan. 1989 (edited, with Steve Leach)

‘Change in the Management of Public Services’, Public Administration Vol.70 No.4 pp.469-622. 1990. (With Kieran Walsh)

The Politics of Hung Authorities, London, Macmillan, 1992 (with Steve Leach)

Management for the Public Domain: Enabling a Learning Society (with Stewart Ranson). St Martin’s Press. 1994

Citizens’ Juries. Institute of Public Policy Research. 2004 (With Elizabeth Kendall and Anna Coote)

The Changing Organisation and Management of Local Government (With Steve Leach and Kieron Walsh). Macmillan. 1995

‘Performance Measurement: When Performance can never be finally defined’. Public Money and Management, Vol.14 No.2 pp.45-9. 1994 (With Kieron Walsh)

Local Government in the 1990s. Macmillan. 1995 The Internal Management of Local Authorities. In Stewart and G. Stoker (eds.) Local Government in the 1990s, op. cit. pp. 68-85

A future for local government as community government’. In Stewart and G. Stoker (Eds.) Local Government in the 1990s, op. cit. pp. 249-268‘Innovation in democratic practice in Local Government’. Policy and Politics Vol.24 No.1 pp.29-41. 1996

'Democracy and Local Government'. Chapter 4 of Reinventing democracy (eds. Paul Hirst and Sunil Khilnani), Cambridge University Press, 1996. Also the 5th supplementary issue of The Political Quarterly, 1996.

‘Reforming the New Magistracy’. In: Laurence Pratchett and David Wilson (eds.) Local Democracy and Local Government. Palgrave. 1996

‘Citizenship in the Public Domain for Trust in Civil Society’. In Andrew Coulson (ed.) Trust and Contracts: Relationships in Local Government, Health and Public Services. Policy Press. 1988. Pp.243-265. (with Stewart Ranson)

The Nature of British Local Government. Macmillan. 2000

An Era of Continuing Change: Reflections on Local Government in England 1974–2014. Local Government Studies Vol. 40 No.2 pp.835-850. 2014

The Lost 40 Years. Municipal Journal. 10 June 2014 Centralisation, Devolution and the Future of Local Government in England (with Steve Leach and George Jones). Routledge. 2017

References[edit]

  1. ^ The New Local Authorities, Management and Structure (Bains Report) London: HMSO, 1972. See also John Stewart Local Government: The Conditions of Local Choice, p.166ff
  2. ^ Local Government Finance: Report of the Committee of Enquiry, Cmd.6453. Stationary Office Books. 1976
  3. ^ The Nature of Local Government
  4. ^ Stewart op. cit. especially pp.1-8 and 18-25.
  5. ^ Stewart: An Era of Continuing Change. 2014.
  6. ^ See for example his article written with Gerry Stoker ‘Fifteen years of local government restructuring 1979-94: An Evaluation’, in Stewart and Stoker (eds.) Local Government in the 1990s. pp.191-205. Also his book The Nature of British Local Government (2000) which updates his discussion in Local Government: The Conditions of Local Choice of both the institutions and the management challenges of local authorities.
  7. ^ Reforming the New Magistracy’. In: Pratchett, L., Wilson, D. (eds’) Local Democracy and Local Government. Palgrave. 1996.
  8. ^ from his 2014 article on An Era of Continuing Change.
  9. ^ The International Library of Politics and Comparative Government, Volume II, The United Kingdom. Dartmouth Publishing.
  10. ^ For an overview see Ranson and Stewart Management for the Public Domain, 1994, pp.120-7 and the work of James S. Fishkin, e.g. his book When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, Oxford University Press, 2009.
  11. ^ Ranson and Stewart op. cit., p.123
  12. ^ See Stewart, Kendal and Coote, 1994, and, inter alia, the work of Claire Delap.
  13. ^ See his article, with Stewart Ranson, on Citizenship in the Public Domain for Trust in Civil Society, in Coulson (ed.) Trust and Contracts: Relationships in Local Government, Health and Public Services. 1998
  14. ^ This volume is part of a series which brings together the most significant journal articles in the field of comparative politics in the last twenty-five years.
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