Territorial Consolidation Reforms in Europe

Bringing together scholars from across Europe, Territorial Consolidation Reforms presents the struggles by politicians, technocrats, and the public to agree on the optimum size of government that balances good performance with good services, and the relevant arguments for the fragmentation, consolidation, or cooperation of government.

Edited and introduced by Pawel Swianiewicz, this 15-chapter anthology presents the major reforms of municipal government that were implemented in Europe in the last decade. Covering much of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as detailing the experiences of "old" EU member states of Denmark, England, France, Germany, and Greece, this book investigates how territorial reforms have impacted local public affairs, public service delivery, local identity and autonomy, and what political and public debates have accompanied or been responsible for success or failure.

The cases in this anthology answer how government did or did not respond to the need to provide efficient services in concert with demands for local autonomy and needed territorial reforms. Chapters on the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary describe a top-down approach to the stimulation of intermunicipal cooperation in service provision as an answer to fragmentation. Chapters on Armenia and Ukraine summarize the debate, and the decision on which has been postponed. In the final pages of Territorial Consolidation Reforms in Europe, the distinguished scholar Robert Hertzog writes about voluntary cooperation of municipal governments as an alternative, while Kurt Houlberg looks further into the relationship between the population size of municipal government and various dimensions of its institutinal performance.