Local government and inter-municipal cooperation in Italy and Germany

摘要: In recent decades Western local governments faced several challenges (from New Public Management-oriented reforms to Europeanization, from decentralization trends to globalization), which put to the test their capacity for adaptation to the new social-economic and institutional contexts and often led to deep transformations in competencies, functions and also in the relationships among territorial levels.In this effervescent environment, the phenomenon of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) has gained growing attention, particularly in the last few years. Until today, IMC experiences have been mostly analyzed by emphasizing their bottom-up features and by focusing on the governance processes, which often characterise them. Overall this can be a limit, because the still relevant roles of institutional actors and hierarchical elements risk being excessively underestimated. In the IMC landscape, in fact, government actors and hierarchical features come back in through the regional (where present) institutions: actually, the role of the regions in the regulation, coordination and steering process of the local cooperation turns out to be decisive. Thus the hypothesis here is that within the IMC landscape, the issue at stake is the complementarity, more than the opposition, between governance and government. An attempt will be made to show that the success of local territorial policies and reforms, such as the IMC experiences, greatly depend on an efficacious balance between deliberative bodies, participatory modalities and “free choices” of the local actors, on the one side, and representative institutions, hierarchical decisions and centralistic guidelines …