Urban Leadership and Community Involvement: Ingredients for Good Governance?

The article asks how political leadership and community involvement together can contribute to legitimate and effective policy making in the context of urban governance. Particularly, the question is discussed if the interplay between both increases capacities for governing localities. Conceptually, this is based on Jessop's assumption that every mode of coordination is failure prone and that there is a need for enduring "metagovernance." The concept of metagovernance is then linked with considerations on institutional contexts and a comparison of four case studies, situated in different contexts. Whereas the case studies can show different practices or failures of metagovernance in the interaction between political leaders and involved societal actors, the institutional contexts are shown to more or less facilitate these practices.