Annual Conference 2019 Lex Localis, Journal of Local Self-Government

Lex localis - Journal of Local Self-Government will host on May 30 - May 31, 2019 respectively, an international Lex localis - Journal of Local Self-Government Annual Conference 2019 organized by Institute for Local Self-Government Maribor (Slovenia) & Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law (Hungary) that will be held in Budapest, Hungary.

Contributions will be reviewed by internationally recognized reviewers. Selected scientific papers will be published in a special issue of Lex Localis - Journal of Local Self-Government (abstracted and indexed in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Current Geographical Publications, Academic's OneFile (Gale), International Political Science Abstracts, ProQuest, Scopus, Current Law Journal Content - an index to legal periodicals, International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)).

The following topics will be discussed: Constitutional and legal foundations for local self-government; Local self-government and local public services (analysis of exclusive municipal functions: education (preschool), general administration (fire and civil protection), social welfare (kindergarten, nursery school and family welfare services), the environment and public sanitation (refuse collection and disposal, cemeteries and crematoria), urban and economic development (town planning and local economic development), public utilities (district heating and water supply); Fiscal decentralization (comprises the financial aspects of devolution to regional and local government and covers two interrelated issues, i.e. the division of spending responsibilities and revenue sources between levels of government (national, regional, local etc.) and the amount of discretion given to regional and local governments to determine their expenditures and revenues (both in aggregate and detail); Politics and decentralization (includes political power sharing, democratization, and market liberalization, expanding the scope for private sector decision-making as a way of opening governance to wider public participation through civil society as an alternative to provide public services in a more cost-effective way); Responses to the current economic conditions and development of global and regional economies (all the regions are addressing enormous challenges emanating from the growth slowdown in developed countries as well as the global credit crunch. Shared impacts across regions are a slowdown in exports, fall in asset markets, reduced credit for consumption and investment, the resulting increase in unemployment and poverty. A joint approach to promoting debate and political consensus on recommendations for reforming the global financial architecture could be pursued through an inter-regional dialogue between the regions, including through cooperation in research culminating in the meeting of policy decision-makers from each region).

International conference on sustainability research and transformation, Leverage Points 2019

Professor Jens Newig from the Faculty of Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany is organizing the Leverage Points 2019 International conference on sustainability research and transformation, for February 6th-8th, 2019. Jens Newing´s work is available here.

For this conference Newig is inspired by the work of Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system, and the conference will explore the deep leverage points that can lead to sustainability transformations.

The question of departure being: how do we transform ourselves, our science, our institutions, our interventions and our societies for a better future? One main conference theme will be on Re-structuring institutions for sustainability transformation.

"Institutional arrangements are deeply rooted structures that shape the rules of a system and, thus, have the power to advance systems change. Social structures, embedded in formal institutions (rules, regulations, and policies) enable, constrain, and guide human action, and thus shape sustainability transformations."

Whithin this theme, the potentials of systemic, institutional change as a leverage point for sustainability transformation will be explored, acknoledging that existing research often lacks a systems-oriented view, and pays only scare attention to processes of institutional failure and decline, and even less to potentially productive functions of such phenomena. This was actually the focus of the work I published on the regulaton of telecommunication [in Spanish] and further work that remains unpublished:

Telecomunicaciones y Política en Estados Unidos y España (1875-2002): Construyendo mercados.  Madrid: CIS/Siglo XXI, ISBN 84-7476-336-3. [Link for download]

Contributions are seek addressing this this gap and that (1) employ a perspective that goes beyond single institutions but take a complex-systems oriented lens; and (2) that pay close attention to phenomena of failure and decline of institutions and the extent to which these can serve as leverage points for sustainability.

This includes, but may not be limited to, issues and topics, such as:
- The role of institutions for sustainability transformations from various theoretical perspectives;
- Crises as triggers for adaptation towards sustainability
- Deliberate dismantling of unsustainable institutions
- The active management of declining institutions
- The identification and unlocking of path-dependency and system traps
- Analysis of institutional coherence, redundancies, and lacunae
- Perspectives on the interplay and integration between different institutions
- Democratic implications of transformation processes
 - Methodological challenges in analyzing and understanding institutional change. 

The conference is premised on three principles: 1) The importance of searching for places where interventions can lead to transformative change; 2) Open inquiry, exchange and co-learning across multiple theoretical, methodological and empirical research approaches; and 3) The need for reflection on modes of research and processes in sustainability research.

Abstracts with a maximum of 300 words should be submitted by 30 June 2018 via the conference website: http://leveragepoints2019.leuphana.de/call-for-abstracts/.

For more information please visit: http://leveragepoints2019.leuphana.de

If you have any specific enquiries about abstract submission please contact: Leveragepoints2019@leuphana.de

More info on my publication on leverage points and the role of institutions in socio political systems historically and from a comparative perspective follows...