‘Local leaders: mayors vs chief executives’, an article by JLGC’s Andrew Stevens, has been published by The Guardian’s Public Leaders Network. Addressing whether the UK can look abroad for localism models and whether overseas localism models can truly be applied to the UK, the article examines what the Japanese model has to offer British local authorities.
With an already established uniform system of local autonomy where elected mayors and governors preside over municipal and prefectural governments, Japan offers an example of a leadership structure of elected officials outside of Europe which is open to study. Particularly as it states:
Executive leadership has become more of a pressing issue in recent years following the wave of municipal mergers (from 3,000 a decade ago to just over 1,800 today) and continued efforts towards decentralisation, with mayors now seen as more than just community leaders. Japanese academics refer to this as a ‘presidential’ style of local governance, though curiously there is some debate in these quarters about introducing “the British system” of local authority ‘chief executives’, as well as replacing elected mayors with indirectly elected ones in order to encourage more collegiate governance.
