Background
Municipalities have been sub-divided into sub-municipal territorial units since many years and in many different countries in Europe. The Portuguese Freguesia, the Polish soĹectwo, the German Stadtbezirk, different kinds of parish councils, neighborhood bodies, city boroughs and arrondissements show the variety of sub-municipal units. Most of them can lean on long-lasting traditions, following older communities and old historical paths. They were serving practical purposes, while they were, in most cases, embodying socio-cultural identities and expressing local communities.
In recent decades, reforms introducing or re-organizing sub-municipal territorial units have been initiated in several European countries, including the UK, Germany, Spain, Greece and Portugal, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as some cities in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Belgium (an overview by Swianiewicz 2015: 173â174). Many of these reforms were attempting to strengthen participatory democracy (Daemen and Shaap 2012; Kersting et al. 2009; Kersting 2016) or representation of different territories in municipal decision-making (Van Ostaaijen et al. 2012), while optimizing territorial structure of municipal administration and increasing service efficiency were not regarded as less important reform drivers (Griggs and Roberts 2012: 185). Sub-municipal governance is often seen as an appropriate tool to counterbalance the negative effects of size, in terms of municipal area or/and population, sometimes in rural areas following amalgamation reforms (e.g. in Germany or Greece), other times in big cities facing negative effects of urban density and overcrowded services with overstretched catchment areas, while simultaneously suffering from alienation and civic disengagement.
A Common Legal Framework?
The most important common legal framework for Local Self-Government in Europe, the European Charter of Local Self Government (ECLSG), does not refer to the sub-municipal level. But, the Additional Protocol to the European Charter of Local Self-Government on the right to participate in the affairs of a local authority that was opened for signature as a convention by the states signatories in 2009 seems to address the issue of sub-municipal governance. According to this additional protocol (art. 1 par. 2), âthe right to participate in the affairs of a local authority denotes the right to seek to determine or to influence the exercise of a local authorityâs powers and responsibilitiesâ and the law (art. 1 par. 3) âmay provide particular measures for different circumstances or categories of personsâ. In article 2 (âImplementing measures for the right to participateâ) of the additional protocol it is said that measures for the exercise of the right to participate shall include, among others: â..ii. securing the establishment of: a procedures for involving people which may include consultative processes, local referendums and petitions and, where the local authority has many inhabitants and/or covers a large geographical area, measures to involve people at a level close to them;âŚâ.
Up to now, this Additional Protocol has already been signed by 15 member states of the Council of Europe (Belgium, Norway and the UK being among them), while the Council of Europe had already previously adopted pertinent recommendations, such as the Recommendation Rec(2001)19 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the participation of citizens in local public life, which was ââŚconsidering that, in certain circumstances, the level of trust people have in their elected institutions has declined and that there is a need for state institutions to re-engage with and respond to the public in new ways to maintain the legitimacy of decision-makingâŚâ. More precisely, this Recommendation asked the states to develop:
⌠both in the most populated urban centres and in rural areas, a form of neighborhood democracy, so as to give citizens more influence over their local environment and municipal activities in the various areas of the municipality. More specifically:
- 1.
set up, at sub-municipal level, bodies, where appropriate elected or composed of elected representatives, which could be given advisory and information functions and possibly delegated executive powers;- 2.
set up, at sub-municipal level, administrative offices to facilitate contacts between local authorities and citizensâŚ.
Furthermore, the Recommendation Rec(2003)2 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on neighborhood services in disadvantaged urban areas (adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 13 February 2003) asks the member states to ââŚset up bodies, such as neighborhood councils, either elected or composed of elected representatives, which could be given advisory and information functions and possibly delegated executive powers;âencourage local residents to become involvedâdirectly or via neighborhood associationsâin the design and implementation of projects which have a direct bearing on their neighborhood;âappoint, through local authorities, elected representatives specifically responsible for monitoring neighborhood problems on a cross-sectoral basis (allocation or delegation of powers on a geographical as well as subject-specific basisâ.
Constitutive Elements of Sub-Municipal Decentralization
These multiple attempts of the Council of Europe to encourage and trigger the institutionalization of neighborhood bodies and services in Europe could lean upon previous experience in many European states. As already pointed out, different countries had developed a rich variety of sub-municipal institutions. Out of the plethora of intra- and sub-municipal decentralization forms (reaching from local outposts of city administration to âquasi-federalâ structures), this book focuses on territorial sub-municipal units, which combine multipurpose territorial responsibility with democratic legitimacy and can be seen as institutions promoting the articulation and realization of collective choices at a sub-municipal level (Ostrom and Ostrom 1970). These kinds of sub-municipal organizations/entities should be concentrating the following characteristics:
- Sub-municipal territorial jurisdiction: They have territorially defined competence over a specific sub-area of the municipal territory.
- Multipurpose: They have responsibilities in different policy fields; they are not single-purpose organizations.
- Not a fully independent layer of local government and without exclusive territorial jurisdiction over local affairs and citizens: They function as territorial parts of a municipality. That means that even if they have their own legal personality and even if they reach a kind of semi-autonomy, their territory is an integral part of the municipal area, their citizens are also citizens of the municipality and municipal decisions are directly (without the need for additional sub-municipal decisions/approvalsâpossibly with few exceptions) being implemented at sub-municipal level.
- Democratic legitimacy/accountability: They are governed by democratically elected (directly or indirectly) bodies, or even by popular assemblies. This does not imply that national legislation regulating how sub-municipal councils/boards are elected would be a pre-condition. Municipal statutes and soft laws introducing democratic election of sub-municipal boards/councils/chairs, etc. coul...