Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay

Project Information

LoGov

Grant agreement ID: 823961

DOI

10.3030/823961

Project closed

EC signature date 15 November 2018

Start date 1 February 2019

End date 30 September 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 1 610 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 311 000,00

Coordinated by

ACCADEMIA EUROPEA DI BOLZANO
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LoGov (Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What is the impact of increasing population movements from the countryside to cities and towns on local public services? How can urban and rural local governments provide and finance these services in times of urbanisation? Does the merging of smaller municipalities really entail efficiency gains and how do other solutions like inter-municipal cooperation fare in comparison? What is urbanisation’s impact on the relations of local authorities with other government levels and how does it affect people’s opportunities for political participation?

These are only some of the questions that the LoGov project seeks to answer. What they all have in common is their growing urgency as a result of fundamental demographic changes. The phenomenon of urbanisation sparked the emergence of metropolitan areas, on the one hand, and the depopulation of rural areas, on the other. According to World Bank data, between 1960 and 2017, the share of rural population worldwide fell from 67 to 45 per cent. These trends inevitably entail lasting changes in the interplay between urban and rural areas. It is our ambition to provide solutions for local governments to address this changing urban-rural interplay and to strengthen collaborative research through staff exchange between the project partners. LoGov identifies, evaluates, compares and shares innovative practices in five major local government areas:

• Local responsibilities and public services
• Local financial arrangements
• Structure of local government
• Intergovernmental relations of local governments
• People’s participation in local decision-making

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve its aim of providing solutions for local governments to address this changing urban-rural interplay and to strengthen collaborative research, LoGov relies on a four-stage research process. This process involves the (1) identification, (2) evaluation, (3) comparison and (4) sharing of local government practices concerning the five above-mentioned local government areas.

Phase 1 of LoGov, that is identifying local government practices, resulted in the collection of such practices in 16 country reports covering Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Croatia, Albania, Moldova, South Africa, Ethiopia, Argentina, India, Australia, Malaysia and Canada. Overall, these reports contain as many as 174 local government practices (WP1: 36 practices, WP2: 34, WP3: 35, WP4: 34, WP5: 35).

Phase 2 of the project was about evaluating the local government practices previously collected in the reports. This was done through semi-structured interviews and workshops in which both academic and non-academic experts expressed their views on the practices collected. In total, we conducted 83 interviews and our 38 workshops involved 947 participants, amounting to an average of 25 people involved per event. Getting an external perspective on the 174 practices was essential for the LoGov partners to achieve a more balanced assessment of these practices and to revise their country reports accordingly. Upon completion of this revision process we were able to publish the final versions of the country reports together with the workshop/interview reports via Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/communities/logov-823961/search?page=1&size=20&q=).

Phase 3 of LoGov focused on the comparison of local government practices. A main achievement and, in fact, precondition for our global comparison was, next to the bilateral secondments, the project’s mid-term conference in October 2022 in Munich because interaction with 107 participants (from 25 countries and 34 experts from the non-academic sector) enabled us to broaden our comparative analysis. Phase 3 involved, in particular, the publication of research area reports concerning each of LoGov’s above-mentioned five themes (https://www.logov-rise.eu/results-per-work-package/) and three edited books which will be published in 2025 by the esteemed publisher Palgrave Macmillan: “Municipal Tasks and Financing” (16 chapters), “Local Government Structure and Intergovernmental Relations” (18 chapters) and “Citizen Participation in Local Governance” (18 chapters).

Phase 4 of the project focused on sharing local government practices with local policy-makers. Besides intersectoral secondments involving our three LoGov partners representing local authorities, this aim was also achieved by several multilateral activities such as a transferable skills training workshop and a practitioners’ course. Finally, the sharing of local government practices was facilitated by the publication of the LoGov white paper “How can local governments cope with changing urban-rural relations?”, which was co-authored by academic and non-academic experts from the LoGov consortium. Thus, this publication enabled us to give the sharing of local government practices an ultimate push together with LoGov’s final conference. This event, held in September in 2024 in Vienna, had an equal distribution of academic scholars and local policy-makers and therefore allowed us to span the nexus from research to practice in disseminating our project outputs.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

LoGov started from the recognition that comparative research on local government has experienced a boom, especially from the 1990s onwards, and that at least some issues linked with changing urban-rural relations have already inspired some scholarly work to build on. Our project goes beyond the state of the art in four ways: the extensive geographical scope of expertise of the global LoGov consortium, a focus on underexplored case study countries, a transversal theme-based approach to comparison and an emphasis on practice-oriented research including local government stakeholders in all phases of the research process.

In this light, LoGov’s impact concerns several areas. First, we achieved gender balance at all levels of the staff participating in the project, ranging from secondees and participants in project events to the WP leaders and management bodies. Secondly, our research design has ensured that gender dimensions are present in our scientific work across all WPs and different types of publications (e.g. insights on local participatory processes facing barriers to effective involvement based on gender and on how the gender dimension impacts on local services such as public housing and education). Thirdly, our project has had a significant impact by enhancing the career perspectives of the staff members involved (e.g. by advancing their research skills and transferable skills through both secondment-related activities and dedicated workshops). Fourthly, LoGov has enhanced cooperation and mobility between the academic and non-academic sectors by including local government practitioners at all stages of the LoGov research process and through intersectoral secondments involving non-academic partners. Fifthly, as part of the LoGov Final Conference in Vienna, the consortium carefully reflected in a dedicated session on follow-up activities after the end of LoGov in order to ensure the sustainability of the project (e.g. digital book launches of the three edited volumes, a presentation of the project results to mayors from various countries at an event organized by the Council of Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. Sixthly, the project has contributed to European policy strategies (e.g. the EU’s Smart Cities initiative and its Partnership for sustainable urban-rural development (RURBAN)).

LoGov