Applying an institutional collective action framework to investigate intermunicipal cooperation in Europe

Abstract

Over the last few decades, European countries have dealt with problems of regional governance in very different ways. A common theme is the debate between supporters of local government mergers to expand the capacity and efficiency in service provision and those favoring local government autonomy and self-determination to protect democracy and government responsiveness. The significant number of scholarly contributions to this debate between mergers and fragmentation contrasts with the scarcity of theoretical attention to decentralized self-organizing mechanisms. This article fills this lacuna by developing an extension of the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework for the European context. The framework defines two dimensions to understand intermunicipal cooperation: the type of urban integration mechanism (imposed authority, dele- gated authority, contracts, or social embeddedness) and the degree of institutional scope (narrow, intermediate or complex). The resulting typology composed by 12 cells is illustrated with examples of intermunicipal cooperation for solving governance dilemmas in the European setting. We advance theoretical propositions rooted in historical, cultural, and institutional differences to explain the variation in the adoption of intermunicipal cooperation by Northern versus Southern as well as Eastern versus Western European countries. A research agenda using the ICA framework is advanced for framing the studies of regional governance in Europe.