The Future of Local Self-Government: European Trends in Autonomy, Innovations and Central-Local Relations

This book presents new research results on the challenges of local politics in different European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Switzerland, together with theoretical considerations on the further development and strengthening of local self-government. It focuses on analyses of the most recent developments in local democracy and administration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030560591

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© The Author(s) 2021

T. Bergström et al. (eds.)The Future of Local Self-Government Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56059-1_1

1. The Essence and Transformation of Local Self-Government in Western Europe

Sabine Kuhlmann¹  , Ellen Wayenberg²  , Tomas Bergström³   and Jochen Franzke¹  

(1)

University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

(2)

Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

(3)

Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Sabine Kuhlmann (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Ellen Wayenberg (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Tomas Bergström

Email: [e-mail]

Jochen Franzke

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Local self-governmentAutonomyTransformationIntergovernmental relations

1 Background and Approach

What does the future hold for local self-government in Europe? Time will tell is a vague but honest answer that we seek to complement in this volume. After all, local governments face strong political, economic and social challenges and increased legitimacy pressure; in many European countries, they are enduring fiscal crises as central governments reduce grants and/or shift services down to the local level, while money often does not follow. At the same time, the demands of the citizens regarding service delivery and participation in local policy-making are growing. In the increasingly inscrutable world, many people are looking for fellowship. They often find this sense of belonging in their neighbourhood which is why municipalities are also increasingly expected to create identity and trust. Local governments are closest to the citizen and lowest on the governmental ladder. That unique position challenges them to constantly (re)define themselves and to show their added value to the outer world. Furthermore, new issues appear on the local agendas as societies struggle with wicked problems such as ageing, demographic change, urbanisation, climate change and the digital transformation, to mention just a few (Head 2018). And at the level closest to the citizen, cities and municipalities are often turned to for response and support.

The crucial role of local governments thus being undisputed, their unique position in the intergovernmental system makes them vulnerable to downshifting of extra tasks and responsibilities as well as to uplifting of necessary financial and other means to do the job. In the current periods of austerity and financial crises, central and/or regional governments tend to play such yoyo games in which local governments often find themselves entangled. Nowadays, governing locally is very demanding. And the various requirements to be (more) responsive, effective, efficient as well as having to meet many other standards at the same time have pushed a lot of local governments to drastically and autonomously reform their political and administrative ways of working (Kuhlmann and Bouckaert 2016; Wayenberg and Kuhlmann 2018). From north to south, east to west, European cities and municipalities are remoulding their organisational structures, procedures and ways of service provision. Some decide to voluntarily amalgamate and to create not only new internal structures (Ebinger et al. 2018) but also a novel local identity for their inhabitants. Others draw on intermunicipal forms of cooperation in order to cope with extended task portfolios and new supra-local challenges (Franzke et al. 2016). Many municipalities outsource services to semi-public and private actors whilst reorienting themselves to the role of managing the arising governance networks. They experiment with online referenda and platforms for citizen engagement, thus introducing smart and digital ways of policy-making (Schwab et al. 2017). And more often than not, local governments take on several of these challenges at the same time, thus stretching their autonomy and capacity to its limits.

Such trends in local self-government are crossing Europe, affecting the lives of large numbers of people. Once spotted and verified, they are expected to continue for at least another 10 to 20 years. Transposing trends through time and space is one way of envisioning the future of local self-government (Compston 2006) but definitely not the only one that is turned to in this volume. After all, in dealing with ongoing as well as potential developments, local governments innovate. They explore new paths and procedures, thus seeking solutions for issues that might not even unfold themselves to the fullest. But maybe they will. And in the light of upcoming risks and consequences, local governments become forerunners. They are taking the lead in innovating local democracy and administration. They test and experiment and give us, throughout this volume, unique cases and tastes of what the future might hold for local self-government in Europe.

2 Dimensions of Analysis: Autonomy, Transformations, Intergovernmental Relations

To unravel local governments’ future, the volume addresses three key dimensions of local government study from different countries’ perspectives:

(1) Firstly, it looks at the essence of local self-government, from an empirical as well as a theoretical point of view (Part I of the book). Under the circumstances described above, some observers may have doubted as to whether local self-governments will succeed in defending their position in the intergovernmental setting. Conversely, others expect a new golden age of local self-government, as all other levels appear to be unable to cope with new wicked problems and challenges many of which demanding localised and tailor-made solutions. Hence, we seek to understand what really lies at the core of local self-government, addressing the issues of (1) political participation, (2) local autonomy and (3) functional responsibilities.

Local governments are not only service providers and executors of centrally defined policies, but also and even more importantly, instances of direct political participation, active involvement of citizens in policy-making, and thus important arenas for democratic learning and practising local democracy. They assume a major role in generating institutional trust and coping with increasing tendencies of political disenchantment and alienation which oftentimes are related to upper-level problems and failures, yet get expressed at the local level. In these increasingly complex and contested environments, local policy-making has become more and more complicated by the decline of the established political parties (for various reasons), often combined with a (subsequent) strengthening of identity politics. New actors (such as protest movements and local citizens’ initiatives) are becoming increasingly important. Against this backdrop, in a somewhat dystopian stance, Tomas Bergström discusses the current state of local democracy and, picking the example of Sweden, portrays some of the fundamental challenges to traditional party-based local politics, such as shrinking discretion and power, de-politicisation, judicialisation, globalisation, privatisation and marketisation. Although he reveals a number of institutional trends which are rather sobering and even frightening, he also emphasises possible solutions and reminds us that local governments have historically been able to adjust to new conditions and that changes can be reversed and transformed into brighter developments.

Regarding the second dimension, a twofold concept will be applied in order to assess the state and development of local autonomy from a cross-countries comparative perspective. Drawing on pertinent concepts for measuring local autonomy (see Ladner et al. 2015, 2019) a number of variables and indicators will be distinguished to assess and compare the formal side of local autonomy (de jure autonomy). This is based on relevant institutional key features and rules regarding the legal, organisational and financial status of local self-government (e.g. constitutional guarantee, degree of state supervision, financial discretion etc.). The analysis is complemented by a perspective which takes municipalities’ de facto autonomy into account and contrasts it with the formal rules and legal provisions. Country-specific and cross-country analyses will reveal that in some cases formal autonomy (as measured, for instance, by the Local Autonomy Index)¹ does not (always) correspond to de facto autonomy and that both sides of the coin must be considered when assessing local governments’ actual room of manoeuvre and their enacted discretion. Examining different concepts and frameworks for measuring (formal and de facto) local autonomy, the chapter by Jochen Franzke and Linze Schaap contrasts the classical deductive approach of local autonomy which predominantly refers to formal institutional structures and rules with the inductive concept of de facto local autonomy which includes the de facto strength of local authorities and their real politico-administrative power as defining properties of local autonomy. The analysis by Pekka Kettunen also applies deductive and inductive approaches for measuring local autonomy and shows that these contrasting perspectives can lead to different results. Whereas, in the Nordic countries, local autonomy is formally ranked high, the reality of the welfare state, based on unity, and standardised services, points to a different direction which raises the question whether Nordic local governments are thus autonomous after all. Current challenges in local autonomy are also in the focus of the chapter by Hanna Vakkala, Anni Jäntti and Lotta-Maria Sinervo who analyse the changing roles, tasks and essence of Finnish local governments. They scrutinise current reforms approaches directed at upscaling local functions and tightening state steering with the result that local autonomy is feared to become artificial and Finnish municipalities need to rethink their raison d’être.

Finally, for analysing the essence of local self-government it is crucial to look at the municipalities’ functional responsibilities and their activities in concrete policy areas, such as spatial planning, schools, social assistance, police and so on. Doing so, it can be explored whether and to what extent a given degree of (formal) local autonomy materialises or not in actual policy-making and service provision. Adopting a sectorial perspective allows for taking the functional logic of local self-government into account, since various public policies will affect municipalities’ actions and citizens’ expectations differently. This approach is taken up by Nicolas Keuffer who analyses nine public tasks with regard to municipalities’ actual discretion and the choice of local governance arrangements. Based on a survey of all Swiss municipalities, he comes to the conclusion that all sectorial policies under study develop their own functional space and affect citizens differently, challenging politicians to be flexible and competent enough to take decisions in complex institutional settings.

(2) Secondly, the volume addresses major challenges and transformations of local self-government in Europe (Part II of the book). Here, the focus is on four major trends and challenges: digitalisation, marketisation, amalgamation and staff recruitment. Around Europe, these challenges and reforms stand out in local governments’ search to adapt to citizens’ needs and institutional demands of both today and tomorrow. Each of them has benefits but does not come without barriers or even losses. The digital transformation is recognised of having a key role in modernising the local public sector. Citizens have high expectations regarding local digital service-delivery such as getting better information as well as a more holistic response to one’s needs (Bonson et al. 2015). But of course, realising these kinds of effects is not only a procedural but also a cultural matter that requires time and energy to locally sink in. There is also an increasing debate about possible negative side effects and unintended consequences of digitalisation, such as a growing digital divide, for example along age groups, or local employees’ fear of being controlled by their managers via electronic tools. Clearly, the (dis)advantages of these innovations vary according to one’s point of view. And that is why the chapters of Part II explicitly take the perspective of different types of actors into account, ranging from political and administrative officials over (semi-)private partners of local governments to their voters and inhabitants. The chapter by Sabine Kuhlmann and Jörg Bogumil provides empirical insights into the current situation, the impacts and effects of digital service delivery at the local level of government, picking the example of German one-stop shops. The study shows that despite an increased costumer orientation, government-citizen transactions via digital tools are hardly common at the local level which is explained by major reform hurdles at all levels of governments and in the intergovernmental setting. Furthermore, from the employees’ points of view there are numerous negative effects of digitalisation which have partly outweighed the positive ones. In a similar vein, Moritz Heuberger and Christian Schwab examine citizens’ expectations towards local e-services, their actual usage and satisfaction with electronic offers in German local governments. The analysis reveals a conspicuous gap between citizens’ expectations regarding local e-services and the actual offer by local governments both in terms of service quantity and quality.

Repeatedly, governmental upscaling via amalgamation has been locally praised for strengthening political voice and unity, especially at higher levels (Wayenberg and Kuhlmann 2018). However, territorial reforms have also been considered the most radical and contested reorganisation of the subnational administration (Ebinger et al. 2018), especially if they are achieved by enforced mergers of local governments (upscaling). By contrast, a less radical versions are voluntary mergers or trans-scaling approaches (intermunicipal cooperation). Many of these reorganisations have been fuelled by recent austerity measures and the hopes of national policy-making that such reforms will facilitate economies of scale. However, evaluations of territorial reforms have shown that exactly these expectations regarding efficiency gains and cost reductions have far less materialised than improvements in local governments’ capacities, professionalism and scope/quality of service delivery. Furthermore, such radical reforms might also bring about unintended and negative effects, all the more if they result in oversized structures and entail losses in local identity. There is a fear that municipal mergers could demotivate people to execute a political office at a wider distance or hamper their social identification (Soguel and Silberstein 2015). Against this backdrop the chapter by Nils Soguel and Manon Jaquerod takes up the question as to whether territorial attachment impacts upon a member of Parliament’s decision to accept a merger of cantons in Switzerland. In their turn, Svenja Ems and Henrik Nürnberger investigate whether council members living far away from the county town in Germany assess the exercise of their office differently than those living relatively closer to the county centre.

Marketisation remains a controversial challenge among local governments, yet it is still one of the most frequently applied reform strategies at the local level. In the past decades, many European local governments have pursued New Public Management (NPM)-driven externalisation of local services to private or non-profit providers (contracting out, functional/asset privatisation, corporatisation, competitive tendering) and some of them have more recently undertaken post-NPM remunicipalisations of previously externalised local functions (Wollmann 2016). Whilst the marketisation practice gets more and more diffused at the local level, local administrators feel pressurised to radically turning around existing ways of working into new, and sometimes even untested, ones. Taking up marketisation from a cross-country comparative point of view the chapter by Andrej Christian Lindholst, Ylva Norén Bretzer, Nicola Dempsey, Morten Balle Hansen and Merethe Dotterud Leiren scrutinises marketisation in the context of local park and road services across England, Sweden, Denmark and Norway and provides empirical evidence on the state, processes and impacts of local-level marketisation strategies and positions these in the pertinent debate about Post-New Public Management.

Finally, local governments across Europe are confronted with the challenge of finding effective strategies for recruiting staff to key positions meant to deal with the above-mentioned transformational tasks, such as digitalisation, climate change and so on, or/and with crucial governance, management and steering functions in the local administration. The question arises as to whether the features of the work place or the features of the location of the work place are the decisive factors for attracting the creative class. Against this backdrop, the chapter by Harald Baldersheim investigates the features local governments can offer in order to attract personnel for key positions. Conceptually drawing on human capital theories and methodologically using findings from a local government survey in Norway the author shows that attractive features of the work place are more important than lively communities or natural scenery for drawing high-calibre candidates to local government positions. In contrast to common expectations and discourses, the findings show that rural and peripheral municipalities may have a quite strong position in the competition for scarce personnel, because members of the creative class hold less of an urban orientation than postulated by central theories of the field.

(3) A third aspect of analysis concerns changes in intergovernmental relations (IGR) that develop in the central-regional-local institutional setting (Part III of the book). How local governments innovate and (self-)govern today and tomorrow is not always and merely a local matter. Often, governments at a higher level of the intergovernmental spectrum are involved as well, be it in policy-making, planning and implementation, be it in supervision, steering and controlling issues. Hence, the choice to direct the volume’s third and final part to the local-regional-central relations. All over Europe, central and/or regional governments do not only steer and supervise the local level hierarchically from top to down. Increasingly, they act as meta-governor, thus aiming to govern local self-government. In theory, their specific role can vary from hands-off framing of self-governance and storytelling vis-a-vis the local level to hands-on support, facilitation and even participation in bottom-up networks (Sørensen 2006; Sørensen and Torfing 2017). As illustrated in the chapters, novel and/or combinations of these roles are arising at the centre. They differ in between policy fields, with forerunners such as science and land use policy, or develop around typical (post-)NPM conditions such as to plan (more) holistically in local governments or to coordinate activities at a new and subregional level. As a result, intergovernmental relations change with some countries/regions tending to more interwoven and fused structures while others seek for a clearer separation of tasks and keeping or enhancing the separational task model (see Kuhlmann and Wollmann 2019). Regarding the effects of these developments, a number of follow-up questions need to be tackled empirically, such as whether cities and municipalities converge in the midst of these contemporary evolutions as well as conceptually, such as whether classic dimensions of de- and recentralisation still suffice to grasp modern intergovernmental dynamics. Against this background, the chapter by Pieterjan Schraepen, Filip De Rynck and Joris Voets addresses the question as to whether—in the case of Flanders—the current shifts in central-local relations represent institutional breaks and critical junctures or rather incremental changes whilst continuing historic path-dependencies and keeping inherited institutional patterns. In its turn, the chapter by Bo Persson and Fumi Kitagawa scrutinises how the relationship between central and local governments has evolved over the last 20 years of research policy in Sweden, taking into account that formal as well as informal reforms can be launched from the top as well as from the bottom. Task-specific elements might also matter to understand the development of intergovernmental relations. And that is why the chapter by Jacopo Klaus examines whether a distinction between qualitative and quantitative aspects of land use planning is crucial to explain the redefinition of central and local governments’ role in this specific field of Swiss policy-making. IGR can vary from one sector to another as the chapter by Ellen Wayenberg shows by unravelling the responsibility that regional field administrations in Flanders have over planning reform at the municipal level. Such regional responsibility might strongly interfere in local autonomy as was recently the case in the German region of North Rhine-Westphalia. The chapter by Christian Person and René Geissler scrutinises the costs and benefits of a regional intensification of fiscal oversight for municipalities whilst the chapter by Steffen Zabler zooms in on new ways that the region uses to limit local government debt (such as the launch of a new debt relief programme and the employment of an austerity commissioner). Finally, the chapter by Benoît Paul Dumas assesses whether the school administration systems converge more across German Länder as a result of their recently implemented reforms.

3 Case Selection: Varieties of Local Government Systems and Groups of Countries

The eight countries covered by the analyses in this volume—Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (England)—represent four country clusters of administrative traditions and local government systems in Western Europe each marked by distinct combinations of institutional and cultural characteristics (see Kuhlmann and Wollmann 2019; Wayenberg and Kuhlmann 2018). Based on a most dissimilar cases approach we aim to reveal the power of local government traditions, institutional contexts and starting conditions for explaining current reform approaches, trajectories and effects from a cross-country comparative perspective. We want to know whether and how the typical features of local government models make a difference for reform outcomes and the modes of coping with new challenges and wicked problems.

Belgium (Flanders) belongs to the Continental European Napoleonic type of local government and is marked by the Roman legal tradition and the importance of statutory law, and a centralised bureaucracy. Traditionally, local governments are functionally rather weak and their average size is smaller than usually in countries of the North or in federal countries. Functional weakness and territorial fragmentation notwithstanding, some local government systems in Napoleonic countries show quite high scores in local autonomy (e.g. France and Italy with an LAI of 26). However, Belgium has an LAI of only 22 and the percentage of own local taxes out of total local revenues amounts to 31 per cent, which is less than in France with 50 per cent and Italy with 36 per cent. Furthermore, the political standing of the local level is quite pronounced in Napoleonic countries, not at least due to its tight connection and entanglement with and its access to upper levels of government.

Germany and Switzerland represent the Continental European Federal type of local government, which displays an essential commonality with the Napoleonic systems because of the strong legalistic orientation of administration and the rule-of-law culture following the Roman law tradition. A crucial difference from the Napoleonic group is, however, the important role of the intermediate and local levels guided by the principle of subsidiarity. As in federal countries many subnational tasks fall with the intermediate (Länder/Canton) level, the percentage of local expenditures in these countries is party lower than in some unitary countries. On the average, the number of inhabitants per municipality is lower than in Nordic countries; thus territorially fragmented instead of consolidated structures are typical (with a few exceptions in some German Länder, such as North-Rhine Westphalia or Hesse). The degree of local autonomy is in general fairly high (LAI of 30 in Switzerland and of 28 in Germany), with Switzerland as one of the top candidates in local fiscal discretion (59 per cent of the local budget is based on own local taxes; in Germany only 23 per cent²). Local governments in these countries are also politically strong as there is a tradition of (direct) local democracy and citizen participation.

Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden stand for the Nordic type of local government systems. These display significant overlap with Continental European countries in their administrative profiles since these countries are also rooted in the Roman law tradition. However, there is a peculiarity concerning the openness of the recruiting and career system in the public service and (specifically in Sweden) the explicit accessibility of the administrative system by the citizens (freedom of information, external transparency, citizen participation, user democracy). Further commonalities with the Continental European federal nations are the subsidiarity principle according to which responsibilities are preferably allocated to the local administrative levels. These countries traditionally possess a highly decentralised administrative structure with territorially viable, large-scale as well as politically and functionally strong local governments, and a high degree of local autonomy (LAI scores between 29 in Finland and Sweden and 27 in Denmark and Norway; the local tax share out of total local revenues amounts to between 68 per cent in Sweden and 40 per cent in Norway). Democratic participation and civic engagement are historically deeply rooted in the local political culture, however, predominately shaped by traditional features of representative democracy.

The United Kingdom (England) is representative for the Anglo-Saxon type of local government systems which—regarding their administrative profile—belong to the public interest or civic culture tradition where the differences between the state and the social/economic sphere are less pronounced and the public and private legal spheres less separated than in Continental European systems. Local governments used to enjoy high levels of discretion and many functional responsibilities while staying comparatively weak in terms of local leadership, political identity and upward access to politics. However, due to (NPM) reforms they have lost this traditionally strong position in many respects which is for instance reflected by English local governments’ rather low LAI score of only 18 and the lowest local tax share regarding the country sample under scrutiny in this book (22 per cent). In territorial terms, English local governments are the European frontrunners of upscaling and mergers which has even raised criticism about oversized jurisdictions and obsessive production efficiency. Some attempts towards more (direct) participation and enhanced local leadership notwithstanding, English local government has remained a largely representative one with only marginal elements of direct democratic participation (direct election of mayors in 16 cities, excluding London; see Copus et al. 2016: 304).

Table 1.1 summarises the main institutional features of the local government systems represented in this volume.

Table 1.1

Key features of local government systems

Source: Adapted from Wayenberg and Kuhlmann 2018 (with further references)

aPercentage of local expenditure out of total public expenditure

bThe extent to which local government revenues are derived from own/local sources (taxes, fees, charges); based on the LAI 2014 (Ladner and Baldersheim 2015 with further explanations): sources yield less than 10 per cent of total revenues: 0; 10–25 per cent: 1; 25–50 per cent: 2; more than 50 per cent: 3

cØ PT of municipalities

Throughout the book, a whole series of regions, cities, counties and municipalities are put in the spotlights. A lot of them are located in north and middle Europe. In essence, this is hardly surprising as these continental parts are well-known frontrunners in public sector innovation as well as in local autonomy (see table above; also Haveri 2015; Ladner et al. 2016). Various lessons can be learned from their novel practices and transformations. These are summed up in a concluding chapter. And as such, this volume ends its journey of brightening the future of local self-government in Europe.

References

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