cause’’ (Stone 1998 b, 15 ), is used to explain coalition building in urban education.
The conclusions drawn by Stone are in some respects depressing but consistent
with his earlier analysis. Coalitions had been assembled crossing sectors. Several
cities had seen some small-scale successes in school improvement but there
remained a problem in getting these neighborhood initiatives to play out more
successfully on a wider stage. And even in those cites where regimes had in the past
strongly delivered on an economic agenda, capacity in the educationWeld has
eluded them. As complex institutional constructions, regimes that give a real
capacity to deliver policy change are not easy to construct.
In both North America and Europe the regime concept has helped to encourage
the shift away from a narrow focus on the formal institutions of elected govern-
ment to to concern with how cross-sectoral institutional capacity is built
in localities in order to get things done. Given the shift from government to
governance noted in the earlier section, this literature has opened up a way
of exploring the way in which the capacity for governance is established and
maintained.
5 Conclusions
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
From an institutional perspective the big positive in the study of comparative local
governance is that institutions remain central to theWeld. There has been a lot of
valuable research conducted, and through that work we know more about the
operation of local institutions both formally and informally. There is now at least a
base for comparative analysis from which to build.
TheWeld provides scope for a more traditional institutionalism focused on the
study of local government systems. So far it has produced some powerful insights
into the diVerences that exist in mature democracies and their shared trends of
reform. What theWeld lacks and has yet to deliver is a genuine global take on
comparative local governance. The arrival of a new wave of democracies and
developments in the mature democracies make a compelling case for a sustained
intellectual eVort in this area. The scope of the task is considerable given the
complex institutional structure of local government in each country. Because
local government is about delivering certain services and programs as well as
about deliberating and deciding over policy issues, the challenge of understanding
the institutional architecture in any one country often requires extensive know-
ledge of the diVerent forms of government and also of a myriad of surrounding
delivery institutions and agencies. However, with appropriate conceptualization,
510 gerry stoker