Re‐thinking local autonomy: Perceptions from four rural municipalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Led by larger urban municipalities, the current municipal reform agenda in Canada places considerable emphasis on the issue of local autonomy. This article looks at how this agenda might affect smaller rural municipalities, since the assumption seems to be that one can simply re‐size and re‐shape policy prescriptions from urban and suburban contexts to fit rural areas. Drawing on the lessons learned from an eight‐year project titled “Understanding the New Rural Economy: Options and Choices,” the authors argue that autonomy is only valuable in relation to a locality's capacity to take advantage of new powers and that rural capacities are very different from those of their urban counterparts. The authors present a conceptual framework in which capacity is a dynamic and multidimensional entity of which autonomy is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition. This framework is then employed to explore four rural Canadian municipalities. This study is the first to consider traditional administrative reforms in a rural context. Employing a case‐study methodology, the authors found four dimensions of capacity that may support changes to local autonomy: strategic planning, citizen participation and support, expertise, and access to revenues. Sommaire : Dirigé par les plus grandes municipalités urbaines, le programme actuel des réformes municipales au Canada met une emphase considérable sur la question de l'autonomie locale. Le présent article porte sur la manière dont ce programme pourrait avoir une incidence sur les plus petites municipalités rurales, étant donné que l'hypothèse semble être qu'il est tout simplement possible de redimensionner et refondre les prescriptions de politiques de contextes urbains et suburbains pour qu'elles s'adaptent aux régions rurales. Tirant des enseignements d'un projet sur huit ans intitulé“Comprendre la nouvelle économie rurale : options et choix” (NER), l'article prétend que l'autonomie est seulement intéressante en ce qui concerne la capacité d'une localitéà tirer parti de nouveaux pouvoirs et que les capacités rurales sont très différentes des capacités urbaines. Les auteurs présentent un cadre conceptuel où la capacité est une entité dynamique et multi‐dimensionnelle dont l'autonomie est une condition nécessaire mais pas suffisante. Ce cadre est alors employé pour étudier à fond quatre municipalités rurales canadiennes. L'article est la première étude à envisager les réformes administratives traditionnelles dans un contexte rural. Ayant recours à une méthodologie d'études de cas, les auteurs ont trouvé quatre dimensions de capacité qui peuvent soutenir des changements pour l'autonomie locale : la planification stratégique, la participation et le soutien des citoyens, l'expertise et l'accès aux revenus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".