Local Governance and Intermunicipal Cooperation

F. Teles

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137445742
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Territory and scale have been some of the most relevant topics in recent political science, but do we know enough about cooperation between local governments? How we think about local government has changed significantly and requires us to be equipped with new epistemological gear, considering more variables and social functions of local government than before. For instance, is inter-municipal cooperation a special arrangement? The answer is certainly positive, not as a consequence of its nature when compared to other alternatives of policy coordination and service delivery, but because it captures almost every facet of the complexity of contemporary territorial governance. Bringing relevant case-studies, previous research, and available literature together, this book will help researchers, students and practitioners with these ideas. The author provides comprehensive information about inter-municipal cooperation and identifies the main gaps in contemporary research.

1

Local Governments Working Together: Relevance and Motivations

Abstract: This chapter offers a summary of the main challenges and reasons for municipalities to work together. Though collaborative arrangements between local authorities are a trend in European countries, they haven’t had a correspondent relevance in research agendas. Its diversity and the interest local government themes usually have may have contributed to this evident gap. In this chapter a brief introduction to this phenomenon is presented and the motivations for engaging in inter-municipal cooperative arrangements are explored together with the different forms it can take. Particular attention is given to the different drivers of cooperation.

Teles, Filipe. Local Governance and Inter-municipal Cooperation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137445742.0004.

Some years ago, a former Mayor from a central European country, during a casual chat over coffee while waiting to address an academic audience, praised the virtues of collaboration between municipalities in a way that confirms the political correctness of the phenomenon, but at the same time illuminating its intricacies. Maybe that is the reason why he seemed to have lowered his voice from its usual volume despite the number of listeners being only one: ‘it takes longer, it takes giving in, it is harder, but, sometimes, it means success’. I’m not claiming that coffee breaks are much more insightful than academic conferences – though some colleagues would certainly agree – but in this particular case it gave me the push I was looking for to have the necessary nerve to debate the topic of municipal collaboration in a book length. I believe the main thrust there was the word ‘sometimes’. There was certainly a lot there to explore, and this is what this book intends to do.

Local governance and municipal cooperation are a complex, diverse and a continuously changing phenomenon. Local governments are living through an epochal transformation, recent but already revealing its practical consequences and producing significant research impacts. We have come to call this a paradigm change or, as I’ll explain in the last chapter, territorial instability. It is not just a makeover: it is a profound, yet new, reshaping of structures, institutions, roles, competencies, borders and scale. Very few things are taken for given in local governance research nowadays, and Europe, in particular, has been watching profound changes in its local and regional structures. Several waves of territorial reforms seem to take place in order to tackle the problem of efficiency and democracy at the lower tiers of government. This permanent mutation has evolved into different political conformations and governance arrangements. The motivation for this book lies in these emerging new answers to the challenge of scale and efficiency at the local level. Particularly the reasons to why these solutions sometimes work.

It is a common phenomenon that municipalities cooperate with each other. Cooperation as such can be either voluntary, initiated by the municipalities themselves, or compulsory, demanded, for instance, by the national government. One of the most common and obvious reasons for this is the insufficient size and availability of resources to deliver services or to fulfil formal obligations. Eventually, cooperation is expected to bring about efficiency through gains of scale and, as a consequence, making it possible to deliver the expected services. However cooperation is not a simple matter of choosing and engaging, but it entails complex negotiation, sharing and collectively delivering services. It is prone to failure, causing unwarranted side-effects and, in most cases, harnesses the democratic control of the involved municipalities.

Do we know enough about how cooperation between local governments works in order to design better governance? Is it possible to induce cooperation? When facing democratic challenges, namely, regarding accountability, are there any innovative solutions? What explains the governance capacity of inter-municipal collaborative arrangements? Bringing together relevant case studies, previous research and available literature on this topic in one book will help researchers, students and practitioners. It aims at providing a systematic analysis of inter-municipal cooperation, the different forms it takes, its drivers, challenges, and known consequences. Finally it suggests how future research should address the issue.

The book will help not only to describe and explain the functioning of these mechanisms of cooperation but will go further in providing practical reasoning and evidence to make inter-municipal arrangements more effective at achieving valued purposes. The aim of the book is not to offer a utopian vision of good governance, nor to claim that this particular form of governance is better in solving scale issues than others; rather it draws on the argument that there is sufficient level of maturity in recent research to offer clear lessons about how inter-municipal cooperation works, despite the evident fragilities researchers should address in the future.

There is a need to analyse literature and overarching trends in inter-municipal cooperation in Europe. The following pages try to do so, in a very simple and straightforward way, presenting systematisations of the available knowledge. In addition, there is a particular chapter focused on the Portuguese case, as a way of illustrating the phenomenon. This book’s research question is simple in its formulation, but – as the following chapters will demonstrate – of no simple answer: why do local governments choose to cooperate, and under what conditions can it work? Maybe the list of questions will get bigger when arriving at the last page than in the beginning of this short systematisation. However, if that is the case, it accomplished one of the objectives: identifying the need for further research on this topic.

This chapter addresses the arguments of those who would doubt the possibility of inter-municipal cooperation to work. The doubters present several good reasons for disbelief. ‘Traditional’ solutions as amalgamation and regionalisation are usually presented as best ways to solve the efficiency problem, and at the same time to bypass the accountability mechanisms of smaller local units and the pulverisation of public services. The idea of the chapter is not to dismiss these concerns but to note that there may be more scope for such arrangements in European context, particularly given the strong identity of its local units.

This chapter, and the next one, will review the doubters’ points of view and present a counter argument, recognising that regional governance arrangements do indeed fail sometimes but also succeed much of the time. Rather than presenting this as just a simple game of winners and losers, the relevance of the debate will be much clearer if the attention is directed to the reasons for success and failure. It is important to understand the nature of collective decision-making and policy implementation through these formal and/or voluntary arrangements of municipalities, rather than engaging in sterile disputes regarding the prevalence of other forms of addressing scale and efficiency over inter-municipal cooperation.

The claim is not to establish a roadmap for success in local governance but rather an informed and evidenced based assessment of the drivers, problems and challenges of inter-municipal cooperation.

The same mayor, presented in the beginning of the chapter, also asked the academic audience: ‘please tell us something we don’t know’. Isn’t this the biggest challenge when addressing a topic like this one? I had an answer then, and I will reproduce it here – by the end of the book. You can skip all the other parts and try to find where it is. But I would suggest a more attentive appraisal of its content.

The growing phenomenon of municipalities working together

Inter-municipal cooperation is a widespread phenomenon going alongside the emerging prominence of networked governance and economy, where political and administrative hierarchical structures are becoming more and more open to horizontal networks, both inter-sectoral and intra-sectoral. The transition from government to governance, as often this phenomenon is called, brings about the development of soft boundaries between territories and fuzzy delimitation of competencies amongst agents, where previously bureaucratic clear-cut boundaries were in place.

This emphasis on partnership working, recognizing that the government cannot work alone (Hambleton, 2005), asks for alliance building strategies. The fundamental insight of this phenomenon is that effective governance is achieved through building cooperation in an everyday complex network of institutions, rules, overlapping territories and powers (Stone, 1989; Stoker, 1995). To quote Stone (1989, p. 6): ‘if the conventional model of urban politics is one of social control ... then the one proposed here might be called “the social-production model”. It is based on the question of how, in a world of limited and dispersed authority, actors work together across institutional lines to produce a capacity to govern and to bring about publicly significant results’.

This implies a new way of looking at political authorities, not as entities able to assure top-down control over specific territories with given competencies, but to the structure of shared power that builds the collaboration through networks of different public and private agents. Cooperation is an ‘expansive activity’ (Sweeting, 2002) with interactions at the local level that has been producing a strong impact in European countries (John, 2001). The outward looking approach institutions need and the establishment of the necessary links to create, maintain and improve the networks capable of answering new challenges puts collaboration and cooperation high on the governance agenda. It demands new competencies from local leaders and new skills from local administration in order to move around the complexities of the new forms of deliberation and service delivery (Stoker, 2006). This isn’t just a matter of local government evolving to local governance, but this also means that local public services face new challenges and ask for solutions for the changing scale and scope of their day-to-day action. Gerry Stoker (2006, p. 42), when explaining Public Value Management as a new narrative in local governance, sees it occurring in a context where ‘individual and public preferences are produced through a complex process of interaction, which involves deliberative reflection over inputs and opportunity costs’, where public management should ‘play an active role in steering networks of deliberation and delivery and maintain the overall capacity of the system’ (p. 45). Networked governance is much more than simple coalition-building. It is about steering partnerships (Stoker, 2000) and to intentionally create and orientate strategies for its success.

This paradigm shift from hierarchies and immovable borders to soft spaces and fuzzy boundaries (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009) has obvious implications for local government, local public service management, local leadership and territorial governance. In fact, the hybrid constellation of actors involved in these collaborative networks has often been used as the perfect motive to suggest territorial reforms, such as municipal mergers or the strengthening of competencies of intermediate tiers of government.

Claiming the relevance of the studying inter-municipal cooperation

Inter-municipal cooperation is actually in a situation of being permanently challenged by its competitive models, especially amalgamation. Some of its fragilities, such as being prone to democratic deficits, when no accountability mechanism is put in place, or instability, when its collaborative arrangements are fluid and change frequently over time, provide strong arguments for those in favour of amalgamation. This is especially true if the challenge being addressed is the economies of scale that both strategies claim to provide. This theme and the competitive models of upscaling governance will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 3.

Why, then, the need for a specific topic of research as cooperation between municipalities when both the transitions from government to governance and its impacts on public services and management have been extensively addressed by several scholars? As a matter of fact, amalgamation itself has been quite productive as a recurrent theme in the agenda of local government researchers, with relevant data, information, policy advice and conclusions that could be reframed for this context or simply adapted to the cooperation settings. But certainly this copycat procedure isn’t as trouble-free as it may seem. The differences between strategies and the intricacies of cooperation are much too relevant to be discarded.

On the other hand, though the existent literature is already relevant, it tends to: focus on descriptive cases with tentative comparison between different country experiences (e.g., Hulst and van Montfort, 2007); follow a different approach and address multiple strategies of dealing with scale and efficiency (e.g., Baldersheim and Rose, 2010; Lago-Peñas and Martinez-Vazquez, 2013; Schaap and Daemen, 2012); or address specific cases (e.g., Agranoff, 2009). The gaps in research and, mostly, the discussion on which topics to include and on the intensity of the research agenda on inter-municipal cooperation still needs to be done and will, certainly, contribute both to the academic audience and to practitioners.

One can point out several reasons for this lack of a coherent, long-standing, scholarship expanding research agenda. The first is an apparent incapacity or, at least, uneasiness to deal with municipal cooperation’s main problem: its diversity. As I will try to show in the following chapter, there are different empirical evidences presenting inter-municipal collaboration as a plural phenomenon: from an alternative to privatisation or to amalgamation, to an instrument of efficient service delivery or of policy implementation, as well as a matter of governance and democratic concern. These examples of assorted focus on the object highlights research design problems resulting from tentative comparative analysis. On the other hand, we also recognise theoretical divergent approaches, some even contradictory. But the differences discouraging a broader and comprehensive analysis of this kind of cooperation are also a result of its different rationales (having voluntary origins or being centrally enforced), and different scopes, motivations, and perceived costs and benefits.

The second motive could have a similar justification as the one often used to explain the lower interest in local governance as a research topic in social sciences when compared to other political arrangements, tiers or institutions. It isn’t certainly the most fashionable topic in academia, neither the one grabbing the attention of the largest group of people in a political science department. It never has been, and most certainly it will never be. Nevertheless, local government and local politics studies have already a coherent, relevant and solid body of research with noteworthy contributions for political science as a whole.

Though diversity in inter-municipal cooperation seems to terrify scholars and to create too many constraints for them to engage in comparative analysis, one could claim the same problems with ‘simple’ local government comparisons. It faces the same challenges of institutional diversity, cultural and administrative multiple traditions, numerous societal functions and dissimilar competencies. Though challenging, these were exactly one of the main appeals for researchers to engage in comparative analysis. Despite national contexts, comparison and broader analysis of local government and politics has become its most common arena.

These are precisely the same reasons that would make inter-municipal cooperation an interesting topic for analysis. In fact, cooperative arrangements between municipalities, between groups of municipalities and other public or private entities, and between local authorities and other levels of government, exist in every European country. This is not a neglectable topic. Cooperation is often designed as a way of leaving the fulfilment of public tasks entirely in the hands of their immediate representatives, with joint operation of public service delivery and the mutual adjustment of local policies. Municipalities engage in collaborate arrangements where public service delivery must yield the necessary economies of scale through coordinated approaches of issues, surpassing traditional territorial borders. Again, this should not be considered as irrelevant. Furthermore, this is not a new phenomenon. In some European countries it is as old as local government itself. France and the Netherlands had the legal framework and authorisation, already in the nineteenth century, to the possibility of common provision of services between municipalities (Hulst, 2000). Again, this is not irrelevant. It produces important impacts not only at the local level, but also in the way public governance is organised within the country.

Local governance has its own history in social sciences, so should municipal cooperation as part of this broader topic. One cannot claim to understand contemporary local governance if collaboration isn’t included in its research agenda. The aim of this book is, precisely, to play a small role in this process of identifying the knowledge already available and to discuss the research agenda on inter-municipal cooperation. It requires multidisciplinary contributions of existing research, which involves theoretical arguments related to the advantages and disadvantages of cooperation, the impact on democracy and accountability, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Local Governments Working Together: Relevance and Motivations
• 2  Diversity in Inter-municipal Arrangements: Nature, Theory and Citizens
• 3  In Search of Efficiency in Local Governance: Size and Alternatives
• 4  Rescaling Governance in European Reforms
• 5  An Illustration: The Portuguese Case
• 6  Inter-municipal Cooperation: Present Limitations and Future Developments
• References
• Index