ABSTRACT
Associated with some of these trends is the arrival of New Public Management or NPM (Osborne & Gaebler, 1993), and a range of ideological perspectives which have rendered the power and politics of rural local government and governance much more complex. These include the dominance of neoliberalism; the re-emergence of ‘localism’; a concern with local democracy and social justice; growing attention to the role of the citizen and community organisations in environmental stewardship; and a concern with the central political issue of representation. And at the centre are the pivotal rural development questions of choice and control, both of which call forth the equally pivotal issues of subsidiarity and capacity. The central themes of power and capacity in rural local government also have to be understood in the context of some universal dimensions of rurality. These include the fundamentals of distance and density, and how these are changing with technology and other factors, and the associated question of scale (Reimer & Bollman, 2010). But they also include the significant diversity of rural contexts, from metro-adjacent zones to rural remote; from primary resource-based to modern knowledge-based economies; and from cultural homogeneity to diversity.
