The Effect of Cluster of Local Governments on the Political Development

Abdul Sattar Kassem's picture
Type: 
Thesis
Year: 
2013
Students: 
Hazem Abed Allatef Ahmad Masuod
AttachmentSize
The Effect of Cluster of Local Governments on the Political Development2.66 MB
Abstract: 

Administrative divisions are basically valid for the promotion of professional development of various kinds. Despite a lot of motivations and influences that exert pressure on States to change the boundaries of these divisions and reforms, the randomness and uniqueness and the lack of advance planning makes these divisions burden on the State. Legislative council branch is the responsible organization that assigns the administrative divisions and boundaries in Palestine. These duties are essential indetermining the stability of the states in order to achieve the desired development and growth. The state appoints theministry of local government to manage theadministrative divisions and chooses a management style to implement its policies and its ideologies. The Ministry of local government in Palestine is the responsible for the administrative division and organized the policies.The are two types of administrative management styles that are adopted by the Ministry of local government including centralized and/or decentralized. The Policy of Cluster is one of the administrative management policies that isadopted by the ministry in 2008, formally through a system of clustering several local government bodies. The researcher is studying thePolicy of Cluster as it relates to in apractical application in Palestine by examining the following hypothesis: The Policy of Cluster with its existing image in Palestine does not contribute positively to the development of different areas. The researcher has adopted a descriptive type of analytical study to answer a key research question that supports the above hypotheses. To test the hypothesis, information regarding the Policy of Cluster were collected from diverse sourcesof government branches as key elements of the research. The researcher then conducted individual interviews with decision makers specifically those who are interested in the Policy of Cluster. Results of these interviews were then tabulated to test the hypotheses. The research is based on the dialectical relationship between officials in the ministry of local government who promotes the implementation of the Policy of Clusterand therecipients of local government councils who are usually spectacle about the success of this policy. The argument of the research is criticalresearch element due to the contradiction in interestsbetween the administrative local government and with the recipients. This policy is aimed at creating administrative efficiency to achieve development through the creation of strong local government councils. The research concluded that the Policy of Cluster did not succeed in achieving the desired objectives due to the lack of a sense of community and/or ownership of this policy. Other factors that contributed to the failure of this policy are the opposition by the local councils’ election district and the organized protests. Further, local councils believe these policies are mostly imported and that they were not true partners with the ministry of local governmentto draw political decisions. The following are a summary of findings and recommendations: • Provide a legal framework to regulate this policy before the proceeding with the adoption of the policy. • Implement a specific type of management of policy either by centralized or decentralized. • The Weak local government councils and its discourteous status made the ministry of local government to strives and find solutions for several policies including common councils services, regional planning committees and the Policy of Cluster. • Policies that were implements by the local ministry did not go through a legislative debate and study. Someof these policies were adopted as a result of western investors and interest groups. • Sovereign decisions such as the decision to “Cluster”have faced challenges due to agreements that were signed by the Palestinian Authority without the proper legislative approval. • The local integration of services is recommend and more preferred over the Policy of Cluster . The current situation is that the state and local councils are in a struggle to becoming sovereign entities. The non-sovereign Palestinian State must be taken into the consideration during any policy developments to strengthen resilience of the desired growth. • Administrative Policy of Cluster is a cluster of local government that is intended to combine efforts with administrative autonomy. • Perform audits and reviewsof local government councils’ election laws. • Perform social dialogue beforeadopting a Policy of Cluster.