„gúzsba kötve táncolunk” zsugorodás és a kontroll leszivárgásának politikai gazdaságtana magyarországi középvárosokban

Abstract

The political economic approaches of urban shrinkage highlight the importance of how the room for manoeuvring of urban governments is shaped by broader, multi-scalar, structural processes. Through the example of the budgetary processes of four Hungarian towns, this article analyses the ways in which smaller cities can influence their future development trajectory. The first section of the article provides a short summary of recentralizing the local governmental system in Hungary in the last decade. While local governmental debt was taken over by the central government around 2014, the tasks and the budgets of local governments were curtailed at the same time. This results in a larger control of the central government over the local governments. While the local governmental budgets decreased, the relative increase of the weight of local taxes does not result in the broadening of the space for manoeuvring of local governments, mainly because of centralizing the institutions of economic development. Even though EU funds and the new public work scheme significantly contributed to local governmental budgets, the specific way how they were allocated and targeted resulted in the increasing control of local marginalized populations. Within the article this process is called as the „trickle down” mechanism of control. Furthermore, the phenomenon of „money-for-the-buddy” sheds light on the fact that the structural tensions present in the Hungarian local governmental system is not managed with formal procedures, but rather with informal arrangements and through the lobbying of local politicians. All in all, these tendencies show that the room for manoeuvring of the local governments of shrinking smaller cities is becoming narrower, and thus the potential modification of their shrinking tendencies is dependent upon broader political and economic changes.