Public Authorities and Intermunicipal Cooperation in a European Context

Abstract

Although not entirely clear with regard to definitions and delimitations, the article by Savitch and Adhikari opens up for a comparative research agenda of considerable importance for better understanding the preconditions for how the metropolis can be governed. Their suggestion that public authorities are important for solving collective problems in the metropolitan areas is also relevant in a European context. There is already a tradition in Europe to establish cooperative arrangements between metropolitan local governments for tasks that requires a larger territorial scale, but Savitch and Adhikari direct our attention to private law arrangements, i.e. inter-municipal corporations. Also in Europe, these have become increasingly common, which may be understood in the light of the increasing marketization of local government. Although lacking in democratic legitimacy, they provide more flexibility and may also include private businesses in their governing body. However, knowledge about their occurrence and functions is limited, which calls for further, systematic and comparative research. In particular, it should be investigated whether they, as in the US, are more common in the metropolitan areas with the strongest resources.