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=(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)).
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/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) 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.
