Every government faces its own particular challenges. For a small-scale democracy, the size of its society might be the obvious limitation. Most discussion about small societies thus focuses on the governance failures caused by this small size.

This book argues that it would be more useful to explore the governance successes that also occur. Based on the research for his PhD thesis at the University of Oxford, Scott Douglas explores successful examples of effective public sector practices in small societies.

This book does not claim to have found the one and only recipe for success. Instead it poses the question: which governance practices have been proven to work in small societies, and what can we learn from them?

Additional information

This book is an executive summary of a PhD thesis by the same author for the University of Oxford. The thesis is entitled Success Nonetheless: Making public utilities work in small-scale democracies, and was supervised by Professor Christopher Hood.