This book examines the nature of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC)1 in Europe. By nature we mean the intrinsic features of governance arrangements and institutions created to generate and maintain collaborative settings between different local governments in a particular territory. Those intrinsic features include motives for cooperation and how their different origins can induce diverse cooperative experiences. They convey also the perspectives and roles of the actors involved, as well as of the consequences of such arrangements. Furthermore, it implies paying particular attention to the democratic aspects of these governance settings, especially regarding legitimacy and accountability features. Looking for these multiple aspects requires not only a comparative approach but also an in-depth analysis of some specific cases, in order to enrich the already available knowledge.
Local governments play an undeniable role in European political and policy landscape. An increasing number of constraints and demands are confronting communities with unprecedented challenges to their institutional settings and self-government ways of thinking and doing. The usual suspectsâgovernance and new public managementâare, now, accompanied by multiple other determinants of these changes. They include austerity policies, trans-border cooperation, territorialised innovation strategies, new technologies, democratic disruptions, neighbourhood micro-politics, gentrification, migrations, climate change and terrorism. This list could easily result from any report assessing the challenges contemporary states are facing. However, local governments are no longer immune, or even less influenced than national governments, to these contextual constraints. In fact, at the lowest level of governance, these are often more acutely addressed and demanding new tools communities were notâuntil nowâexpected to be equipped with.
The consequent wave of reforms aimed at dealing with the challenging times faced by local governments has produced significant changes. From modernisation to reorganisation of services delivery, functional and territorial re-scaling, governance arrangements between public, private and non-profit sector organisations and cooperation, local governments have been involved in a complex, often frequent, set of reforms, which changed their systems and patterns all over Europe (Bouckaert and Kuhlmann 2016).
As stated elsewhere (Teles 2016, p. 2):
We have come to call this a paradigm change or [âŠ] 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.
There are important differences between countries and European regional patterns of local authorities in terms of the scope, frequency and content of these reforms. There are also clear differences between how public utilities, social services and infrastructure are organised and run at the local and regional level. However, performance improvement â(in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy) is a key function of local public sector reformsâ (Schwab et al. 2017, p. 101).
The complex array of services and answers to communities, in which local governments operate, requires special conditions to be able to control (or, at least, steer) these networks of public, private and semi-private sector organisations, whose territories exceed, most of the times, the municipal boundaries. If not the organisation involved in the service delivery, most certainly the problem being addressed will require a multi-actor approach from local authorities. To question the limits of more traditional forms of governance or the borders of administrative territories is an undeniable consequence of contemporary conditions. The design of effective governance arrangements has, therefore, changed significantly the balance between consolidation and competition which have enriched earlier debates on local government reforms. The quest for efficiency had been significantly dominated by those two main trends: on the one hand, to consolidate organisations, territories, andâeventuallyâmerging municipalities and political institutions; on the other hand, to promote, in different ways, new opportunities for the competition between territories in order to expose their relative advantages, giving them more capacities, autonomy and policy discretionary tools and in that way challenging the local context in search of the survival of the fittest. It is precisely within this backdrop that cooperation presented itself as a new player available to enter the match between those, often ideologically driven, competing sides.
There is a wide agreement that in this complex setting, most of the problems can be addressed only through joint actions of multiple actors involved in different and, often, flexible arrangements, crossing sectors and levels of governance (Schwab et al. 2017). The concepts of multi-level and inter-sectoral governance capture this in an interesting way since, together, they underline the fact that local governments have to interact with other levels of government and, within each oneâs borders, different actors, from the public, private and non-profit sectors, work together for common and agreed purposes.
But at the same time that some services remain predominantly local and public, both in the tools used to determine how and which ones to be delivered and in the mechanisms to provide them, there are several issues that must be addressed beyond the strict confinement of municipal borders. Sustainability and climate change issues, water and waste management, relevant infrastructures and regional development strategies are just some of the few examples of those circumstances that require new mechanisms of interaction. The first and most relevant questions that need to be addressed are usually the ones that result from these new economies of scale. Evidently, the main aspect under consideration is the way services are delivered in more policy and cost-efficient ways. Consequently, issues related to the relative importance of municipalities, the way their inhabitants are consulted, the tools they have for making decisionsâand making accountable those that decideâare also high on the agenda.
Frequently used as the starting point of any comparative endeavour, the size of municipalities is a useful tool to understand why these questions related to economies of scale have risen so high in the political agenda and act as one of the drives of local government reforms in Europe. Though there is no clear regional pattern of municipal size in the Europe, nor does it explain why some countries have preferred to implement territorial reforms to address this creating larger local entities, the âsize argumentâ is inescapable if one wants to understand the argument behind the search for efficient service delivery at a higher scale or with larger municipalities (Baldersheim and Rose 2010; Askim et al. 2016).
Local service delivery, and its quality and efficiency, is inevitably linked to the different approaches of the reforms, namely, territorial and functional re-scaling, since it addresses its most common problem: the size of the locality and the problems of economies of scale. There are many reasons why services should be provided by the lowest level of government, and one of them is definitively âproximity,â since local governments are closer to citizens and, thus, can respond to their specific needs, adopting tailor-fit policies. This also allows for better democratic accountability of local politics. The problems of scale, particularly those resulting from the need to deliver services at a higher level than the municipal one, have been answered through âhardâ mechanisms in several countries over the last couple of decades. Amalgamation, its most common example, where localities are merged to form new entities, has contributed significantly to this change of the European municipal landscape. Alternatively, âsoftâ mechanisms such as IMC have allowed local authorities to provide different answers to similar problems. These allow functional optimisation without profound changes to the territorial or political status of the locality. The strengthened inter-local cooperation allows municipalities to keep their autonomy and, at the same time, obtain the same economy-of-scale results as in amalgamation processes.
Local Government Under Pressure: The Rise and Evolution of New Arrangements
The emphasis on partnership working asks for new alliance building strategies and mechanisms. The main insight of this perspective is the fact that effective governance is only achievable through nurturing cooperative arrangements between different actors in an everyday complex network of organisations, territories and âdemosâ (Teles 2016). In this context, IMC is a widespread phenomenon. It goes hand in hand with the emergence of open horizontal and vertical networks of inter-sectoral and intra-sectoral conditions. The prominence of networked governance arrangements brings about the softening of the boundaries between municipal territories and amongst the competencies of the multiple actors involved. A clear-cut delimitation of functions and of territories is no longer possible.
IMC has been a topic of debate in European academic literature for a long time. However, a gap in scholarship results from a deficit of comprehensive comparative studies. So far, the only comprehensive study (Hulst and Van Montfort 2007) just covered eight European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe, a volume has been edited by Pawel Swianiewicz (2010). There are, also, some texts comparing two different countries (e.g. Wollmann 2010) or focusing on the general aspects of the phenomenon (Teles 2016).
The existent literature, though already quite relevant, tends to focus on comparative research and tentative typologies based on the identification of general commonalities (e.g.. Hulst and Van Montfort 2007). Another approach tends to place cooperation within a wider set of alternative reform paths and ways of addressing the problems of scale and efficiency (e.g. Baldersheim and Rose 2010). Specific cases (e.g. Agranoff 2009) or two-country comparisons are also common. Evidently, the gaps in research result, mostly, from the difficulties of addressing such a diverse and complex phenomenon.
Though highly emphasised in academic literature (e.g. Teles 2016), the main questions regarding the relevance of these inter-local cooperative arrangements remain to be answered, especially in order to measure how important these are in the functioning of local government systems in individual countries. The way municipalities formalise their collaborative arrangements, from loosely coupled policy networks, with informal character, to formalised procedures, with governing entities, is just one example of such diversity. Inter-municipal cooperative arrangements vary in shape, scope and integration. They result from the political initiative of diverse, often opposite, agents and present different forms in their intrinsic nature and in the theoretical lenses used to study them. Furthermore, its main drivers and motivations are of multiple natures. To add complexity to the picture, national administrative traditions, governance systems, political culture and the different levels of local autonomy in each country make the development of a tentative typology of IMC a hazardous, if not impossible, task. Furthermore, most of these dimensions are not the result of a limited number of options. They are, in fact, a continuum of possibilities, which would not translate easily into an objective typologisation of reality.
Though we acknowledge the advantages of typologies, we claim the need to move forward in this research ...