Evaluation on Auckland Governance Reform

In my personal perspective, the reform reveals the fail of functioning of last governing body in Auckland. The reform brings benefits in accordance with making corrections to the past governing structure with radical change, although, it still faces a number of challenges. The challenges are associated with associating institutions, and planning and policy instruments. Since the new Auckland City Council is established, I am really interest to look a bit into the viability of the new council.

The transitions to sustainability will continue to occur in Auckland with complexity, uncertainty, diversity and change. Dr. Bruce Hucker states that they will not be removed by simply governance structure reform (2010). These factors are caused by the unpredictable future, and with successful designed institutions and collaborative relationships between institutions, these factors’ negative influences will be mitigated. However, the reform is just begun, to Auckland it is a radical change, the governing body and twenty one local boards along with seven council controlled organisations are newly formed less than half a year of time, there are still quite a number of relationships need to be built and the institutions themselves still needs to be refined so that they can function appropriately.

The seven council controlled organisations are facing crucial challenges of functioning and performing well in their roles. Firstly, the seven CCOs are adopted by new governing body while there are already forty CCOs in existence, this means the seven CCOs are extremely big in scale with more complexity and powers than the ones in existence; secondly, the CCOs’ expertise and strategic ability may not match new governing body, contrarily, the CCOs may actually turn over and control Auckland Council due to the raises of organisations’ prospect rather than being controlled (Hucker, 2010).

However, the reform is not complete by simply changing the governing structure, new council should be precautionary rather than react when issues are raised. it is crucial that to have a complete awareness of key issues in existence and forecast future challenges in order to reduce uncertainty, these are especially required during the governing body is developing its long-term vision and direction planning and policy instruments. Dr. Bruce Hucker (2010) states that, the success of Auckland governance reforms depends among how political legitimacy, democratic accountability and sustainable development are achieved together in practice. The legitimacy’s fundamental is how strong the relationships and partnerships are formed between the institutions. Democratic accountability is highly depended on the public participation in decision making procedure, whereas the local boards are working with governing body on behalf of communities. In order to achieve sustainable development, governing body has to develop appropriate directions and visions for local boards as well as CCOs. As new governing body is developing its long-term planning instruments, council should take communities’ needs and well-being into account as priorities in the upcoming instruments. The instruments should also include a mechanism to be able to quickly deal with situations involving complexity, uncertainty, diversity and change in the future.

Overall, for new Auckland Council in order to prevent failing in functioning, it still requires council look into issues after the reform and make changes, ability to adapt to the changes and uncertainties  are key determinants to test new council’s viability.