Abstract
Abstract Though the exploration of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is very widespread in contemporary literature worldwide, the perception of IMC by municipal officials is rarely examined. We focused this paper on revealing the relationship between the perceptions of municipal public officials and the realized benefits of municipal cooperation. Our research combines primary data from a survey of municipalities engaged in a form of IMC and in-depth interviews of both municipal officials and managers who coordinate IMC. Our survey results show that agreement with the statement that IMC helps solve administrative capacity problems tends to vary with the size of the municipality. This study detected considerable obstacles to IMC use, with one set of respondents indicating that they had tried cooperation and found that it did not yield significant, positive financial or non-financial benefits for them. Our in-depth interviews revealed that strong political leadership and experienced managerial staff can contribute to the development of municipal cooperation. In summary, our research provides evidence supporting the notion that the perception of IMC by municipal officials could be an important precursor to actual IMC use and future development.
Highlights
Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is an ongoing issue in the structure of public administration in many countries, with particular interest in those settings with high levels of municipal fragmentation (Soukopová & Vaceková, 2018)
About a quarter of officials favored local action groups (LAGs), with only 10% of the respondents indicating that contracts between municipalities were their preferred IMC form and 2021 licensee Sciendo
The globally recognized public administration approach of IMC exists in the Czech Republic in several forms: informal cooperation, contracts between municipalities, Voluntary Associations of Municipalities (VAMs), LAG, and hybrid organizations
Summary
Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is an ongoing issue in the structure of public administration in many countries, with particular interest in those settings with high levels of municipal fragmentation (Soukopová & Vaceková, 2018). Zeemering’s (2016) study concluded that this traditional political jurisdictions approach could be refined and researched in future, providing one of our motivations for testing the following assumption: The longer public officials (e.g., mayors) are in office, the more they are experienced in and aware of various management issues of municipalities This experience and awareness allow them to realize the potential for benefits from cooperation and leads experienced officials to attach more importance to IMC engagement than less experienced officials do. Efficiency of local services could be perceived by public officials in the case of the Czech Republic as one of the stimuli for IMC because they play an important role in the daily life of community representatives and their relationship with citizens.
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