Local Governance as Government-Business Cooperation in Western Democracies

The internationalization of economics and politics has forced local governments to develop new context-appropriate strategies; these strategies, characterized by a greater degree of interaction with non-governmental key actors and with the business world in particular, have been termed local or urban governance. This article is intended to illustrate the impact of three factors — local leadership, local political arenas and intergovernmental relationships — on the formation of cooperative networks between local governments and business organizations as one of the basic types of urban governance model. To achieve this, a comparative multi-level analysis presenting the CEO's perpective on such issues was conducted. The results show how local and intergovernmental opportunity costs and leadership are the factors that largely determine the degree of collaboration between local government and business.