Rethinking the ‘local state’ and local capacity

Considering the state-society relationships of local governance leads to conceptual and practical questions about local capacity to decide and pursue local priorities and meet local needs and the role of local government in these processes. In England’s extremely centralised governmental system, debates about local capacity tend to be subsumed by the constraints to which it is subject. Combining scholarship on policy capacity, local governance conjunctures over time and local government’s role within these informs conceptualisation of a plural, relational local state. This draws attention to local government’s everyday, intra-locality relations with its constituent communities, broadening a vertical, reductive perspective to a horizontal, more generative understanding of local capacity to care for place through collective practices.