Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia

This book compares local self-government in Europe. It examines local institutional structures, autonomy, and capacities in six selected countries - France, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, and the United Kingdom - each of which represents a typical model of European local government. Within Europe, an overall trend towards more local government capacities and autonomy can be identified, but there are also some counter tendencies to this trend and major differences regarding local politico-administrative settings, functional responsibilities, and resources. The book demonstrates that a certain degree of local financial autonomy and fiscal discretion is necessary for effective service provision.

This book provides commentary on the influence of multi-layered political contexts that surround the work of teacher educators worldwide. It addresses the drawbacks of the massification, standards-based movements and marketisation of universal business that threaten authenticity, innovation and entrepreneurship within teacher education on a global scale. The chapters celebrate the richly described local stories that explore the often tacit political activity that underpins teacher educators’ work.

This book considers local autonomy, measured as a multidimensional concept, from a cross-country comparative perspective, and examines how variations can be explained and what their consequences are. It fills a gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive study of the different components of local autonomy across a large number of countries, over time. It offers a theoretically saturated concept to measure local autonomy and applies it to 39 countries, including all 28 EU member states together with Albania, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland Turkey and Ukraine, over a period of 25 years (1990-2014).