There are several self-evident truths when it comes to achieving gender equity in local government. Increasing women’s political participation is the first step and an unproblematic good. The focus must hence be on removing barriers to ensure elected bodies are representative of the broader population. When gender parity is achieved, political institutions will change, to become more gender sensitive, more deliberative, less conflictual.
More than thirty years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action towards gender equality, these axioms are looking shaky. Why have substantial increases in women’s participation as party members, candidates and local representatives not significantly challenged men’s political dominance? Inclusion is not enough, and sometimes, it may even be the problem.
Research from parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, shows that women are not absent or excluded from democratic life, they are active participants. Put differently, women make important contributions to local politics but in ways that are rendered invisible, unrewarded, taken for granted, and exploited. They are included, but on disadvantageous terms.
Challenging the political dominance of ‘majority’ men hence requires going beyond addressing women’s exclusion to examine the terms of their incorporation: the contributions women make to democratic life and electoral politics; what they receive in terms of political opportunity or power; against the costs and burdens of their participation.
Take for example Gayatri*, who has been a loyal party worker in Dehradun: a city in North India. For two decades she has invested time, energy and money to her party, organising ‘supporters’ to attend rallies, connecting residents to government entitlements and campaigning during elections.
These activities generate significant positive political sentiment towards her party, but are often invisible, under-recognised, rendered ‘outside of politics’, and hence unrewarded. When she requested the party ticket to contest municipal elections in a seat reserved for women, the party instead selected the wife of a new party member. Gayatri declared: “This is exploitation! I will never work for the party again”.
Or Ibu Dewi*, who was approached to be a candidate in Medan’s 2024 local elections in Indonesia. The party needed her to fulfil gender candidate electoral quotas that require every third position on the ballot to be a woman. For over three months, Dewi spoke to small groups of women, organised campaign events and went door-to-door, promoting the party, then the presidential campaign, and only then her own campaign.
Dewi expended her physical and emotional resources, and depleted her household savings. For her efforts, she received less than 300 votes in a ward of 20,000 voters. She was heartbroken, and furious: ‘All this effort for what? Only the parties benefited from my campaign.’
Even as elected representatives, women often do more for less recognition. Sarah* was elected as a councillor in Sydney, Australia, on the basis of her community advocacy. After her election, she got to work reopening a swimming pool: applying for the government grant, chairing the committee, and liaising with community to redesign the facilities.
When it came to cutting the ribbon however, it was the Mayor who took centre stage, inviting his political allies alongside him. His party claimed this achievement in their re-election campaign material. Across councils in my home state of New South Wales, community members, council staff and councillors reported women as being diligent, putting in the work but not receiving the credit. This under-recognition has electoral consequences; Sara was not re-elected.
My comparative ethnography of local politics in India, Indonesia and Australia shows that the terms of women’s incorporation at each stage of the ‘ladder of political recruitment’ is often inequitable, and at times exploitative: women do more, bear more burdens, for fewer returns, compared to men. This is the case not only for women, and not all women equally. Structural relations of power such as white supremacy, religious majoritarianism, caste, ableism also shape the terms of incorporation into local politics.
I am not suggesting that we should not strive to achieve gender parity, or better put, to ensure that people of all genders are present and have influence within political systems. Inclusion remains an important goal, as are removing the barriers to exclusion. But reforming electoral democracy only through inclusion is insufficient. There is an equal need to transform its underlying value-system towards genuine democratic practice in which everyone participates on equal terms.
*All names are pseudonyms
Tanya Jakimow is a professor of anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Tanya’s current research concerns the enduring problem of political over-/under-representation in local government in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tanya-jakimow/
Women’s under-representation in local politics is a global problem, and no less the case in Australia. In my home state of New South Wales (NSW), women make up 39% of councillors in rural and regional councils, with more than a quarter of local government areas (LGAs) having fewer than 30% women. To achieve ‘gender parity’, the government funds programs to encourage and train women to contest elections and become a councillor. While having a demonstrable positive impact, the focus on ‘fixing women’ arguably detracts from the more pressing need to ‘fix the environment’.
On either side of the 2024 NSW local government elections, I conducted research to see what we could learn from rural and regional LGAs that either experienced a sharp increase in the number of women contesting and winning local elections in 2021 (from less than 25% to at least 50%), or that have had persistent men-dominated councils (more than 75% men) over at least 4 terms. The ten in-depth case studies entailing interviews with councillors, former councillors, candidates, community leaders and participant observation, yielded several lessons about what makes an environment more, or less, conducive to women’s local representation.
First, more women contested and won elections in LGAs where a ‘collective sentiment for change’ was cultivated. The 2021 election was a watershed; the Covid-19 pandemic and revelations of sexual violence in parliament sparked national conversations about the kinds of political leaders needed. In some LGAs, this national conversation became localised.
Residents looked at the record of men-dominated councils and initiated discussion about what the next council should look like. Councillors wrote newspaper editorials, organised events for women candidates, and tapped women on the shoulder to consider standing. All contributed to a shared sentiment that it was time for a more gender balanced council and a collective motivation by women to be part of that change.
Second, name-recognition was a key determinant of voter preferences in councils with persistent men-dominated councils; women performed well as candidates when they had opportunities to promote themselves as candidates. In councils where candidates communicated directly with voters through newspaper editorials, in door-to-door campaigning and especially candidate forums, women often impressed, and were elected in higher numbers
In contrast, a low-key electoral culture with limited campaigning can advantage men. Men are more likely to bear the name of established families in the area, to hold leadership positions in prominent organisations, and to be official heads of farms and large businesses. They also enjoy the premium of a masculine name in a low information context. In a system of compulsory voting, disinterested voters often vote “just because they know the bloke” (community member).
Third, a discourse that council should stick to the masculine-coded activities of ‘roads, rates and rubbish’, makes men the ‘natural leaders’. Australia has not been hit by austerity to the same extent as the United Kingdom, yet its local governments are cash strapped due to a poor revenue base and cost-shifting from state and federal governments. Hence the potency of a political message to ratepayers that we need to get ‘back to basics’, presenting feminine-coded services of childcare, libraries, community centres as a threat to fiscal responsibility, and hence women’s contributions to civic life as incommensurate with local government.
In contrast, in LGAs where councils have a strong relationship with community groups and sectors such as the arts and care, women see a natural progression from community leadership into council. Community events provide opportunities for women leaders to build relationships with councillors, which leads to informal mentorship and succession planning. Women majority or gender-equal councils thereby can persist over time.
These are just three of the ways that local conditions matter for the number of women contesting and winning elections. The research suggests alternative approaches to increasing women’s representation in local government beyond training women: initiating public debate about the qualities needed of councillors, enriching the information context, and ensuring strong relationship between councils and community groups.
The environment of course must be conducive for a diversity of women, including racialized minorities, First Nations, women with disability, and across age and income. The point is that the environment matters, not that there is a single set of conditions. Many of the first-time women candidates I spoke to had benefited from the training programs rolled out in the lead up to the election. While none said it was pivotal to their decision to contest, they felt more confident, and in some cases, the advice strengthened their campaigns. The question is not whether such programs are useful, but rather are they enough, and the best use of limited resources. Fixing the environment in which women become councillors, rather than treating the women as the ones who need to change, is an alternative approach worth considering.
Tanya Jakimow is a professor of anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Tanya’s current research concerns the enduring problem of political over-/under-representation in local government in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tanya-jakimow/
What place does local government occupy within the UK system of public governance? International evidence suggests that UK local government combines three characteristics: comparatively low expenditure, small locally attributed tax revenue and medium-low institutional autonomy.
We now explore the evidence, draw conclusions, and clarify some of the assumptions and limitations of our conclusions.
Recently published OECD data indicate that United Kingdom local authorities account for expenditure equivalent to 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2023. This was below the EU27 average of 11.1 per cent of local government expenditure. Locally attributed tax revenue for the UK amounted to 1.7 per cent of GDP compared with an EU27 average of 3.7 per cent.
In this blog, “local government” refers to the OECD’s S.1313 local-government subsector. Depending on national institutional arrangements, this may include regional and other intermediate authorities as well as municipalities. See the note at the end of the blog for more on the OECD reporting of data.
The UK differs considerably in its expenditure and fiscal arrangements from some northern European countries, particularly Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, which have long been rated as having high scores on the published estimates of “Government Effectiveness” (see the World Bank published Worldwide Governance Indicators database). For the countries included in our analysis, local government tax revenue and expenditure are each moderately and positively associated with national government effectiveness (r=0.43 and r=0.44, respectively).
Three points should be kept in mind. First, these correlations establish association, not causation.
Second, “Government Effectiveness” is a national governance indicator that is based on perceptions of public services, the civil service, policy formulation and implementation, and government credibility. It is not a direct measure of local-government effectiveness. Its use in this analysis is on the grounds that local government is part of a multi-level governance system, interacts administratively and financially with central government, and may affect the effectiveness of the national governance system.
Third, the tax revenue data reported by the OECD do not measure only taxes over which subnational and local authorities have unilateral control and therefore are not appropriate for measuring tax autonomy. According to the OECD (2025), the reported tax revenue figure is partly own-source taxes and partly taxes shared with central government. We cannot immediately infer from these data how much discretion subnational and local governments possess over rates, tax bases, reliefs or use of revenue.
The results suggest that a relatively large and fiscally significant local-government sector is compatible with effective government, but they do not demonstrate that a large local fiscal role causes government effectiveness. Two findings stand out:
1. Countries with comparatively high local government expenditure or tax revenue generally have medium-high or high Government Effectiveness scores (see the World Bank’s databank).
2. Countries with low local government expenditure or tax revenue display a much wider range of government effectiveness scores. Türkiye, Mexico, and Colombia are at the lower end and Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are at the upper end.
The relationship involving tax revenue data is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Scatterplot of government effectiveness and local government tax revenue, 2023
Note on tax data in Figure 1: For unitary countries we use the OECD’s main subnational figure, which corresponds to the S.1313 local-government subsector. For federal and quasi-federal countries, we use the separate “Local government alone” figures.
Using OECD data for 2023, we found a strong positive correlation (r=0.79) between local government expenditure and local government tax revenue. We hypothesise that countries with larger local government sectors provide the required finance partly through transfers of money from central government and partly through local taxes, fees and charges. Figure 2 illustrates the existence of a strong correlation between local government expenditure and tax revenue.
Figure 2. Scatterplot of local government expenditure and local government tax revenue, 2023
Note on tax and expenditure data in Figure 2: For unitary countries we use the OECD’s main subnational figure, which corresponds to the S.1313 local-government subsector. For federal and quasi-federal countries, we use the separate “Local government alone” figures.
Figure 2 also reveals the presence of a small group of countries in which locally attributed tax revenue is lower than would be expected based on the scale of their expenditure. This is evident visually: the countries lie noticeably below the general expenditure-taxation relationship implicit in the figure. As can be seen, this group includes Austria, Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Table 1 presents two measures of the relationship between tax revenue and expenditure for these countries: the tax coverage ratio and the local government tax-expenditure gap. The tax coverage ratio is calculated here by dividing tax revenue by expenditure and multiplying by 100. The tax-expenditure gap is calculated by subtracting tax revenue from expenditure, with both expressed as percentages of GDP. It represents the scale of local government expenditure not matched by locally attributed tax revenue. It is not a measure of a budget deficit and should not be understood as consisting entirely of central government transfers.
Table 1 Local government expenditure and tax revenue in selected countries, 2023
Country
Local-government expenditure (% GDP)
Local-government tax revenue (% GDP)
Tax coverage ratio (%)
Local-government tax–expenditure gap (% of GDP)
Estonia
10.5
0.2
1.9
10.3
Czechia
12.2
0.4
3.3
11.8
Lithuania
9.2
0.3
3.3
8.9
Slovenia
8.9
0.5
5.6
8.4
Slovak Republic
8.5
0.5
5.9
8.0
Netherlands
12.7
1.2
9.4
11.5
Austria
9.2
1.3
14.1
7.9
United Kingdom
9.3
1.7
18.3
7.6
Source: calculated from OECD (2025) data. For Austria, the “local government alone” figure is used.
The fiscal picture shown in Table 1 raises a broad institutional question: does it reflect a conception of local government as a distinct sphere of democratic governance, or primarily as an administrative means of delivering responsibilities determined nationally? The existence of low tax coverage (e.g., less than 20%) and a relatively large tax-expenditure gap (e.g., over 7 % of GDP) do not imply a fiscal imbalance because local government receives funding through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, low tax coverage and a large gap is consistent with a system in which local authorities have significant service responsibilities but comparatively small locally attributed tax revenue.
We stress that expenditure and tax data do not by themselves establish the extent of local government autonomy. For autonomy has constitutional, political, and administrative dimensions as well as fiscal dimensions.
Therefore, we need to examine autonomy more comprehensively. We turn to the Local Autonomy Index (LAI 2.0) (see Ladner, Keuffer and Bastianen, 2025). According to this index, UK local government belonged to the medium-low autonomy group during the period 2015 to 2020. Its LAI score was below both the EU and OECD mean scores. It was not the lowest on local autonomy: some countries, including Ireland, Russia and Belarus, recorded lower levels of local autonomy than the United Kingdom.
The UK received a comparatively low score on the LAI’s “non-interference” dimension. This suggests that UK local government is subject to significant forms of financial and administrative supervision.
In summary, we conclude that the expenditure, revenue and autonomy evidence suggests that UK local government occupies a comparatively constrained position within the wider system of public governance. Local authorities perform important public functions, but the locally attributed tax revenue is small, and their institutional autonomy is only medium-low by international standards. In England, statutory intervention in authorities judged by national government to be failing provides a particularly visible example of the vertical powers of supervision and control retained by central government.
These findings do not demonstrate that greater fiscal decentralisation would automatically improve public services or government effectiveness. They do, however, provide grounds for carefully designed and evaluated pilot reforms intended to strengthen local fiscal and strategic autonomy. Such experiments would need to assess not only their effects on local choice and accountability, but also their implications for service performance, fiscal sustainability and territorial equality.
Note
The OECD uses “subnational government” to encompass state, regional and local government. In unitary countries without a regional tier, this may consist primarily of local government, which is municipal councils and higher levels of local government. In the case of the OECD data on the UK, the devolved administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are included in central government. Most of the countries in the OECD data are unitary countries, and so mostly we are talking about local government when looking at subnational data. The federal and quasi-federal countries included in this analysis are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and Switzerland, for which local government data alone is also reported.
Ladner, A., Keuffer, N. and Bastianen, A. (2025) ‘Local autonomy around the world: the updated and extended Local Autonomy Index (LAI 2.0)’, Regional & Federal Studies, 35(2), pp. 163–185. doi: 10.1080/13597566.2023.2267990.
Bruna Ribeiro (University of Minho), Miguel Rodrigues (University of Minho) and Francisca Tejedo-Romero (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
Why do some municipalities open their books, publish their contracts and document their decisions online, while their neighbours – operating under exactly the same legal framework – remain opaque? Freedom of information laws set a floor, but the striking fact about local government transparency is how much variation survives above that floor. If the law were the whole story, all councils would look alike. They do not.
In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we explore one part of the answer that has attracted growing attention across Europe: who leads. Specifically, we ask whether female leadership changes how much information municipalities actively disclose to their citizens — and whether the political context in which women govern conditions that effect.
The theoretical case is well established. Research across countries has associated women’s political presence with lower tolerance of corruption, different risk preferences, and a stronger orientation towards accountability. Earlier work on Spanish municipalities found that women’s representation in local councils has a positive influence on transparency levels. But representation on the council and leadership of the executive are different things. Mayors set administrative priorities, control the machinery that produces (or withholds) information, and answer personally for what appears on the municipal website. If gender matters for transparency, the mayor’s office is where we would expect it to show.
Portugal offers an unusually good laboratory. Since 2013, the Municipal Transparency Index (MTI), produced by Transparency International Portugal, has scored all 308 municipalities from 0 to 100 on the information they make available through their official websites. This gives us a consistent, externally produced measure of active disclosure, in a system where women remain a small minority of mayors but where the 2006 Parity Law — recently strengthened from a 33% to a 40% candidate quota — has been steadily reshaping who enters local politics.
We linked each municipal election to the transparency performance of the government it produced: the mayors and councils elected in 2009 and 2013 were matched to the Municipal Transparency Index scores of 2013 and 2017, across all 308 municipalities. This temporal structure ensures that who governs strictly precedes what gets disclosed. We then tested whether the gender of the mayor is associated with transparency — on its own, and in interaction with two features of the political context: whether the mayor governs with an absolute majority, and whether they belong to a left-wing party. The models control for women’s presence in the council, financial autonomy, unemployment, turnout and population, and the results hold when we exclude Lisbon and Porto and under alternative specifications.
The headline result is not the one either optimists or sceptics might expect. Female mayors, on their own, have no statistically significant effect on municipal transparency. But the average conceals a striking conditional pattern. Without an absolute majority, female mayors are associated with transparency scores roughly 7.5 points lower on the 0–100 index than their male counterparts. Give them an absolute majority, and the association flips: the interaction adds around 10 points, turning the net effect positive — female-led municipalities with strong political backing outperform male-led ones. There is also suggestive (though weaker) evidence that belonging to a left-wing party partially offsets the negative baseline.
In other words, the question “do women govern more transparently?” is badly posed. The better question is: under what conditions can they? Women in Portuguese town halls are still rare — only about 7% of municipalities had a female mayor in the period we study — and those governing without a majority face weak institutional support that appears to hinder the implementation of transparency measures. Political strength provides the stability, resources and authority to translate leadership values into open governance; without it, being a pioneer is mostly an uphill struggle.
Three implications travel well beyond the Portuguese case.
First, transparency policy is usually designed as if compliance were a purely administrative matter — build the portal, mandate the disclosure, audit the result. Our findings suggest that who is in office, and the political incentives they face, shape how far councils go beyond the legal minimum. Transparency is a political choice dressed up as an administrative one.
Second, the debate on gender quotas and parity laws tends to focus on descriptive representation — how many women get elected. Our evidence suggests that numbers are not enough. The mere presence of women in leadership does not, by itself, deliver more open government; what matters is whether they hold real power to act. Quotas should therefore go beyond numerical representation and be accompanied by the conditions for women to exercise actual influence — party support, resources, and genuine political authority. Putting women in office without power risks setting them up to underperform against expectations the literature itself created.
Third, for practitioners and transparency campaigners, the lesson is about where to aim. If disclosure responds to political context, then rankings and indices like Portugal’s Municipal Transparency Index are not just measurement tools — they are interventions, changing the reputational payoff of openness for the leaders most sensitive to it.
This article is part of a wider research agenda at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP, University of Minho) on gender and local politics in Southern Europe. Companion studies have examined how women break the political glass ceiling at local level (Governance, 2025) and how voters respond to female candidates in local elections (South European Society and Politics, 2026). Together, they trace the full pipeline — from candidacy, through election, to what changes once women actually govern.
The transparency question sits at the end of that pipeline, and it may be the most consequential part: representation matters not only for who sits in the town hall, but for whether citizens can see what happens inside it.
Bruna Ribeiro recently completed her PhD in Administrative Sciences at the University of Minho (CICP). Miguel Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho. Francisca Tejedo-Romero is based at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha.
The full article, “Transparency in local government: exploring the impact of female leadership and political context”, is available in Local Government Studies:https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2025.2612054
The urgency of Sonia Busso’s call for councils to develop participatory governance arrangements is evident in her recent INLOGOV policy paper[1], The Participatory Council. Bussu recognises that politicians can enable or block this development and argues that progress can be impeded if the council as an institution is not prepared for meaningful participation. I argue in this blog that an equally important precondition of action is that political parties are engaged in participatory processes, reflecting their roles in both councils and wider civic society.
The Participatory Party should sit alongside the Participatory Council.
Bussu sets out a convincing set of recommendations to advance inclusive participation including developing the role of boundary spanners, building on existing community assets and resources, and adopting an intersectional approach to engage marginalised voices.
She recognises the part that political parties played in two of the five case she refers to: the introduction of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil; and the radical widening of the participatory infrastructure and processes in Barcelona. A third case, the deployment of citizens’ assemblies in the London Borough of Camden, was initiated by the then council leader Georgia Gould[2] following her recognition of the councils’ failure to listen to the residents of tower blocks in the borough before the tragic Grenfell Fire.
Bussu distinguishes between “disjointed events vulnerable to the political cycle” and “coherent processes embedded in day-to-day policymaking”, an ambition which is reflected in Gould’s final leader’s annual report in which she claimed the council was “getting on with a radical shift in power that is seeing democratic renewal led from the bottom up”.
In my view, however. more attention needs to be paid to how political parties can play bigger roles both in enriching civic society and in embedding participatory process in the way that Bussu seeks. This is particularly important at a time when populist parties are opting for simplistic solutions rather than engaging with the hard graft of participatory policymaking.
Gould, for example, in a lecture in 2022 called for a move beyond a transactional model of public services. Demanding the abandonment of traditional structures and hierarchies and a recognition of the power of communities and the ability of residents to change their lives, she warned that “services that don’t have a connection to communities or an understanding of their needs can be de-humanising, paternalistic and create a transactional model of public services that cannot make lives better in the longer term.”
In terms of the contribution of politicians and political parties to this, there are three key lessons from the experience of three of Gould’s predecessors: Herbert Morrison, leader of the London County Council and dynamo of Atlee’s post-war government; Richard Crossman, Minister for Housing and Local Government in Harold Wilson’s first cabinet; and David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield and holder of three cabinet posts in Tony Blair’s government.
First, the potential for exploiting the contribution of political parties as an important feature of the wider civic society. Morrison, for example, was clear that it was impossible to understand local government without understanding how political parties worked. It was “out of the clash of opinion and principle between the parties” that progress was made. For Crossman vibrant local government hinged on overcoming public apathy and that political parties had the potential to do that so long as party membership provided substantive opportunities to influence party policy. Writing when he was leader of the Labour Group on Oxford City Council in 1939 he said: democracy inside our parties is as valuable a part of our liberties as the right of voting at elections.”
Blunkett believed that the value of local politics was not confined to its legal powers, but to its ability to extend and develop democracy enabling the emergence of new social movements. During the period when he was leader of Sheffield, Blunkett argued that “if we can stimulate the community action that brings people into the [Labour] party and gets them to relate their community problems to a sense of political purpose, then we have begun to change society.”
Second, the value of engagement beyond the council and the party. Towards the end of his period as a leading local politician Blunkett warned that town halls could feel “impossibly remote and anonymous”. Reflecting on the state of local government in 2023, he said council leaders should do more than run their authority: they should see the council as a mechanism for fully engaging local people. Morrison, in his reflections on his period as leader of the LCC in the 1930s, came to a similar conclusion: “It was important that councillors and aldermen, once elected and appointed, should still move among the people they represented. They should be with and for the people, not above them.”
Finally, the key link between local government and wider civic society. Crossman was clear that “the real basis of successful political democracy is not to be found in politics at all, but below the surface in the organisation of a whole network of popular interests”. He argued that the future of the Labour party depended on not on the competence of its leaders and its electoral success, but also on the creation of “new organisations for the conquest of liberties yet unwon.” Blunkett was equally honest about the need for local politicians to avoid paternalism. Writing in 2002, when he was Home Secretary, Blunkett described how every since his first experience of canvassing in his council ward he had been “keen to inform and involve as many residents of Sheffield and its environs as possible in the aims and decision-making of the council.”
Bussu is right to stress that participatory governance requires sustained political commitment and is vulnerable to political change. The work of Gould and politicians such as Morrison, Crossman and Blunkett has created the foundations on which to build a participatory party. And Andy Burnham’s statements about how he intends to lead the Labour Party and listen to communities suggests that now is a good time to do so.
Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations at the University of Birmingham.
This report examines the experience of ‘challenger parties’, political parties without previous experience of government, on entering power in local government. It examines the experiences of challenger parties in English local government following electoral gains in May 2025, focusing on how Reform UK and the Green Party of England and Wales have adapted to executive roles. Evidence from multiple case studies shows that, rather than transforming local governance, these parties have generally worked within existing institutional frameworks, with some early disruption typically giving way to learning and stabilisation as members adjust to formal procedures and constraints. The research was developed with colleagues in Inlogov’s monthly Local Government Network webinar.
Councils need to develop participatory governance arrangements to address the declined levels of public trust in government, by giving residents a meaningful voice in decision making, improving transparency, and ensuring policies better reflect community needs and priorities. This report examines how councils can support institutional culture change towards participatory policymaking, drawing lessons from UK and international experiences. Too often, great work by individual officers, members or specific projects is lost because the council as an institution is ill prepared for public participation. The report argues that participatory policymaking must be deeply embedded within governance structures to enable meaningful engagement, mobilise diverse communities, and support mutual learning and transformative change. Achieving this requires facilitative leadership and the cultivation of boundary-spanning roles that bridge divides between government, civil society, and local communities. Advancing inclusive participation also demands an intersectional approach that centres marginalised voices to address systemic inequalities. This paper was written by Dr Sonia Bussu.
Councillor remuneration plays a critical role in shaping participation in local democracy and the effectiveness of council governance, yet the current system in England remains inconsistent and increasingly misaligned with modern expectations. The total annual cost is around £230 million. Allowances vary widely between councils, reflecting a structure that has not kept pace with inflation or the growing demands of the role. This misalignment contributes to persistent barriers to participation, particularly for working-age individuals, those without independent financial means, and carers, with evidence indicating that remuneration levels directly affect both the diversity of candidates and their retention in office. Addressing these challenges requires setting more accessible allowance levels to broaden participation, enhancing consistency and transparency, expanding and normalising support mechanisms, and improving the evidence base to support informed and equitable remuneration decisions. Thanks to Emeritus Professor Colin Copus and Mr Ray Tomkinson for co-authoring this paper.
Government discourse increasingly accentuates devolution and local autonomy, using constitutional language. This paper aims to take the debate forward by examining the prospects for constitutional entrenchment of English local government within the existing uncodified constitutional framework. Encompassing both strategic and principal authorities within the term “local government”, it assesses what entrenchment could mean in the absence of a codified constitution, what obstacles stand in its way, and how constitutional weight could accumulate over time. The paper was written by Inlogov associate Prof Jonathan Davies.
INLOGOV Blog 