Currently, we welcome Prof. Dr. Renate Meyer, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria* as WIPCAD Guest Researcher.
She will deliver a guest lecture on "Fragmentation and complexity: Governing organizational landscapes after the agency fever" in the WIPCAD Lecture Series on Wednesday, 18 Nov, 12-14 h (room 3.07.S25) and offer a workshop for PhD fellows on "Challenges for Urban Management and Governance" on Thursday, 19 Nov, 10-14 h.
Workshop description 19 Nov
"Challenges for Urban Management and Governance: Open, sustainable, transparent and / or bureaucratic?"
Modern city management has to address multifaceted political, economic, legal, technological, demographic, and cultural challenges in times of increasingly scarce resources. Key concepts in this context are transparency, accountability, openness, participation, or sustainability. However, the bureaucratic organization of the administration with its foundation in rules, the law, and the ethos and secrecy of the office conceptually clashes with the informality and fluidity these ideas convey.
As a consequence, bureaucracy is regarded as obstacle to effective and ‘good’ government. On the other hand, developing countries are regularly encouraged to institute well-functioning bureaucracies as a prerequisite for fostering state capacity and responsible government, and recent research challenges the compatibility of ecological sustainability and social justice, or of open government data and participation. In this workshop, Renate Meyer reports from current research along these lines at the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at WU Vienna.
The following questions and topics will be addressed:
On the conceptual level: Do the reform trends towards more openness and participation undermine the functioning of bureaucracy and if so, how does this impact state capacity? How can government secure its capacity to act amidst trends to privatize, decentralize, digitalize, mediatize? How do Weberian bureaucracies deal with processes that aim to achieve openness and transparency through inviting the crowd to co-create services and experiences?
On the normative level: What are consequences of going ‘beyond bureaucracy’?
On the methodological level: How can we study these processes?