Local government amalgamations and inter-municipal cooperation: state of the art and new ways forward

Together with economic and social changes, local government amalgamations, inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) and related reforms have been promoted in several countries during the last decades (Dollery and Robotti 2008; Kortt... [ view full abstract ]

Together with economic and social changes, local government amalgamations, inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) and related reforms have been promoted in several countries during the last decades (Dollery and Robotti 2008; Kortt et al 2015). In most cases, these changes have been introduced with the aim to overcome territorial fragmentation (that has been viewed as a problem in several countries - Swianiewicz & Mielczarek, 2010) and institutional boundaries to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness of public services. Over the last decades, they have spread and scholars have started to empirically analyse them in many countries, trying to identify their drivers and impacts.
Within this backdrop, our paper proposes a literature review on local governments' amalgamation and inter-municipal cooperation with the aim to i) explain when, where and how these two issues have been studied; ii) highlight the main results of these processes and the predictors of successful and unsuccessful experiences; iii) identify the main gaps in the literature and moving forward the research agenda. To this end, we have conducted a systematic literature review of all the papers on amalgamations and inter-municipal cooperation that were published in public management journals since the 1960s. Subsequently, we have developed a coding scheme to analyse the collected papers, composed of the following items: theoretical framework, research methods, research question, geographical area, period of reference, amalgamation/inter-municipal cooperation conceptualisation, institutional level, effects/variables investigated, results.
Preliminary results shed light on the following issues: the majority of studies tend to adopt a quantitative approach; both qualitative and quantitative analysis tend to not draw explicitly on a specific theory; the impacts of amalgamations and IMC on the level of public expenditures have attracted more attention as compared to the effects on the quality of services; studies have increased in the wake of the New Public Management and of recent financial and economic crisis, variables such institutional and political context and span of time appear to explain the differences found between experiences.