Metropolitan challenges and reform pressures across Europe – the perspectives of city mayors

ABSTRACT

Metropolitan governance arrangements and their policy purposes have been a matter of debate among researchers and practitioners around the globe. While we may trace three broad schools of metropolitan governance – reform school, public choice theory and new regionalism – with each still having its proponents, we are interested to learn whether there are assumptions on metropolitan governance that have today become general knowledge among urban political elites. By investigating the attitudes and perceptions of city mayors across Europe, we show that functional multipurpose governance bodies are indeed more generally associated with equitable service distribution, whereas the preconditions for cost-efficiency and sustainable development are more equivocally placed at different modes of governance. Moreover, we show that a perceived general lack of problem-solving capacities does not automatically translate into pressures for metropolitan reform, but it is only in combination with a general disaffection with the governance structures currently in place.

KEYWORDS:

• Mayors
• metropolitan governance
• equity
• cost-efficiency
• sustainable development
• reform pressure

Supplemental data can be accessed here.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the comments made to previous versions of this work by the participants in the 2017 Swiss Political Science Congress in St. Gallen. We also acknowledge the comments made by Michael A. Strebel, Daniel Kübler, Joan-Josep Vallbé, Hubert Heinelt, as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The POLLEADER II survey does not allow for testing propositions regarding the central role of interregional competition for creating flexible arrangements mainly aiming at economic promotion of the region for the global market, as suggested by some critical accounts of new regionalism (Brenner, 2002). Nonetheless, with sustainable development and cost-efficient service delivery, we cover two aspects that presumably have also been at the heart of new regionalist endeavours, whether for economic or for political motives.

2. The small or more rural countries include Iceland, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Croatia, Ireland, Slovakia and Austria; Romania had a very low response rate; many false negatives on the filter question where identified for Albania, Serbia and Belgium; there were many nonrespondents in the case of England, Norway and Czech Republic; the items were missing altogether in Denmark and Netherlands; a low absolute number of answers further resulted for Hungary and Portugal.

3. The response rate does not account for Greece since we lack information on the national sample universe, given the wide-ranging territorial reforms since the Eurostat classification of 2011.

4. Since the new regionalist approach is more flexible in terms of the institutionalisation of governance arrangements, our proxy for core beliefs refers to the old metropolitan debate, demarcating reformist assumptions from public choice theory. These are useful reference points, since the second part of our paper is concerned exactly with the question of metropolitan institutionalisation.

5. Our hypotheses and regression models presume general associations between governance modes and problem-solving capacities across the entire population of city mayors. The interaction term added to the respective model in Table A2 (Appendix) is insignificant, indicating that the found associations are not conditional upon a mayor’s core beliefs in line with the metropolitan reform school.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Dlabac

Oliver Dlabac leads the research group on Local Democracy at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau and teaches on decentralisation at the University of Zurich. He has published on local and regional democracy in Switzerland and is currently leading a research project on the democratic foundations of urban planning in the city regions of Birmingham, Lyon and Zurich.

Lluís Medir

Lluís Medir lectures in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interests include local government and public policy, and his most recent publication is ‘Dealing with Austerity: a case of local resilience in Southern Europe’ in Local Government Studies, 2017.

Mariona Tomàs

Mariona Tomàs is an associate professor of political science and member of the GREL at the University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on metropolitan governance and urban policies. She has published articles, book chapters and comparative studies in the field, and, with Jean-Pierre Collin, a book, Penser métropolitain? La bataille politique Du Grand Montréal, Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012.

Marta Lackowska

Marta Lackowska is an associate professor at the Department of Local Development and Policy, Faculty of Geography and Regional Science, University of Warsaw. Her research is focused on inter-municipal cooperation (she is currently leading a research project comparing IMC in European countries), metropolitan governance, urban studies and local policies. She is a Board member of the European Urban Research Association.