A contextual explanation of regional governance in Europe: insights from inter-municipal cooperation

ABSTRACT

Cooperation among fragmented local entities for service delivery is a common problem in Europe that has been understudied from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Drawing on the institutional collective action framework, this article advances and tests a contextual explanation of the emergence of interlocal collaborations by following a second-generation rational choice approach to the study of regional governance. Doing so, it systematically addresses: how context matters in specific choice situations; how the establishment of various governance structures with different characteristics depends on specific contextual factors that can simultaneously reduce transaction costs and risks for cooperative actors; and the practical policy implications of these choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional governance
• municipal fragmentation
• inter-municipal cooperation
• Italy
• institutional collective action framework

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable advice and comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An SSD is composed of a set of municipalities belonging to the same Local Health Authority, within which social, welfare, and health services are provided.

2. Cfr. Attachment to the resolution of the Venetian regional council of 6 August 2013, n. 1417, emphasis added.

3. By looking at the number of municipalities and the population involved, MUs can be classified as: ‘only big,’ i.e. MUs only with municipalities over 5,000 inhabitants; ‘only small,’ i.e. MUs only with municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants; ‘couples,’ i.e. MUs that involved only two municipalities; ‘satellite,’ i.e. MUs with several small municipalities ‘rotating’ around a big one; ‘archipelago,’ i.e. MUs that combine heterogeneous municipalities.

4. Nine MUs were excluded as preliminary analysis showed two of them were in the process of forming a new institution, four in liquidation, and three were not officially activated. In this way, it was also possible to minimize the risk of self-selection of the sample which would have provided a sample that was not entirely representative of the studied universe. The validity of this representativeness was also confirmed by a subsequent statistical procedure, taking into consideration some context variables traditionally used by national and international literature on territorial cooperation and on polycentric territorial structures (ANCI 2005; ESPON 2016): the type of territory in which each MU is present (mountainous/non-mountainous) and the average population and the number of municipalities of the MUs.

5. One of the aims of establishing interlocal agreements is to reach critical mass in order to mainly attract external financing and to better converse with the higher levels of government, and it emerges in both regional contexts examined. As an ANCI representative argued, in fact, 'MUs are created for achieving greater political weight and have more possibilities to intercept European and national fundings. […] It is therefore becoming a political issue: if you are together, you are more impactful and above all, you are able to influence some vast area policies. This is particularly true for small municipalities that alternatively would not be able to impose their own political influence on the territory.'

Additional information

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Mattia Casula

Mattia Casula is a post-doctoral Research Fellow in Political Science at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His research interests and publications are in the field of public policy and administration, with a focus on subnational and local levels. Former member of the Board of the Regional Studies Association, he is currently co-coordinator of the Standing Group “Regional Studies and Local Policies” of the Italian Political Science Association.