Local government reform beyond privatization and amalgamation: advances in the analysis of inter-municipal cooperation

ABSTRACT

Inter-municipal cooperation, where two or more local governments jointly provide one or more public services across their jurisdictions, is an increasingly prevalent mode of public administration. In part, this reflects the limited success of prior rounds of privatization and amalgamation reform – and the continuing desire to economize and improve regional coordination. In part, it speaks of the wider policy fashion for seeking collaborative solutions to public problems. This article introduces a special issue on “the drivers and effects of inter-municipal cooperation.” It reviews the current evidence base and the contributions of six papers, and suggests productive avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-municipal cooperation
• local government
• public services
• shared services

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H72
• H75
• H76
• L33

Acknowledgments

This research is part of the project PID2022-138866OB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF/EU, and the project 2021 SGR 00261, funded by Generalitat de Catalunya. We appreciate the comments received from the participants in the workshop Frontiers of Local Government Reform (Intermunicipal Cooperation and Remunicipalization), held in Barcelona, November 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Leibenstein (1966) for X-inefficiency.

2. While we focus here on reforms that affect the form in which local services are provided, and -in particular- the provider jurisdiction, it is worth mentioning other reforms have gained interest in the recent decades, affecting the form in which the services are delivered, within the public-private duality. On the one hand, corporatization has involved the creation of organizations external to the administration but still under government control, so that service delivery can be publicly managed with greater autonomy (van Genugten et al. 2023). On the other hand, re-municipalization has involved bringing back under government control the delivery of services that had previously been privatized (Clifton et al. 2021). A recent special issue has been recently dedicated in this journal to the latter (Re-municipalization of public services: Trend or hype’, volume 24, issue 3, 2021).

3. By “joint contracting” we mean two or more municipalities contracting with one or more private operators.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2022-138866OB-I00]; Generalitat de Catalunya Agencia de Gestio d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca [2021 SGR 00261].