Councillors: Bringing Order and Accountability to Chaos

The paper presents the results of research conducted in England and Poland which explored the way councillors interact with organisations – public and private – outside of the council of which they are a member. Local government and the councillors elected to it are central to any conceptualisation of local representative democracy. The council and councillors do not however, inhabit centre-stage in the locality, but, face a struggle, across Europe, for engagement themselves in a complex series of governance networks as well as facing challenges from their own neighbourhoods (see, Sorensen and Torfing, 2005, Lowndes and Sullivan, 2008). The shift from local government to local governance places an additional burden on councillors, in any setting, who are faced with retreating into their council and focusing on what it does only; or, with engaging with communities and community groups and with a range of bodies that develop public policy and allocate public resources in complex multi-layered networks. Within those networks councillors must to attempt to exert influence rather than control, as they confront higher-level organisational players whom they must seek to hold to account (Wilson, 1999, Stoker, 2004, Denters and Rose, 2005, Copus, 2016). Councillors, by virtue of holding an elected office, have a legitimacy and leverage lacking to most of those with whom they now work within the complexity of modern governance and who lack direct lines of accountability to the public (Saward, 2003). The paper will address the following questions, in our two different national settings: • How do councillors effectively act as vehicles for the accountability of governance networks? • What strategies do councillors employ when attempting to hold governance networks and actors within them to account? • How do the attitudes and behaviours of councillors, shape and in turn are shaped by a developing role in demanding and securing the accountability of public and private instiutions that operate within governance networks? The paper will provide a new understanding of the way in which councillors attempt to govern their areas and of how far the role of the councillor has changed to meet the new and complex demands made on the office.