Introduction

After the communist regime collapsed in 1989, the rebirth of local government in 1990 was an integral part of the transition from the ancien régime to a democratic political order. The second face of the development of public administration applied at the local level was more complicated; this was the delegation by law of a portion of state administration to the municipalities. The Czech Republic thus returned to a fused model of territorial administration, in which the same local bodies are entrusted with the execution of both local self-government and state administrative competences (Illner, 2011, p 525). The practical operation of this model runs up against a clash between two organisational logics and two value orientations – local democracy and autonomy on the one hand, and effectiveness and efficacy on the other. This tension cannot be avoided even in policy work at the local level.

This chapter intentionally focuses more on policy work at the local level (see Colebatch et al, 2010) rather than policy analysis in its different meanings. A quarter-century of efforts at reinstituting self-government and a dozen years after the most recent phase in the reform of public administration in the field of delegated competences is not a particularly long period, for example for the establishment of decision-making patterns among local political leaders. The tension noted above illustrates the need to stress a combination of different perspectives and to consider the context, which is described by the distinction between output-based and activity-based accounts of policy work (Colebatch et al, 2010, p 17). While the state administration is more focused on results, an important element of local self-government and autonomy is experience. Finally, the emphasis on description of the profile and opinions of decision makers also corresponds to the current state of research on public policies on the local level. In his conclusion to a co-authored monograph dealing with local government and local development in rural communities Josef Bernard stated: ‘Czech political science still lacks any work which focuses in depth on the area of analysis of the specific policies of local governments and their impacts’ (Bernard et al, 2011, p 206).