Local Government Structure and Intergovernmental Relations: An Urban-Rural Perspective (Local and Urban Governance)

The is an Open access book. It provides a comparative and multidisciplinary analysis of how structural issues of local governments and their relations with other government levels are dealt with globally. The volume stands out with three essential features. First, the comparative research reflected in the volume has a global geographical scope because it is the outcome of a Horizon 2020 project involving 18 partners from six continents. Therefore, it includes highly topical and so far under-researched case studies beyond just the European continent.

Secondly, we look at the above-mentioned topics from a timely urban-rural perspective, as the ultimate aim is to explore the impact of the phenomenon of urbanisation on local governments and the response of urban and rural municipalities. Thirdly, the book focuses within broader research on the structure of local government and intergovernmental relations on several specific topics that have been revealed by our project as particularly relevant. These are decentralization within metropolitan areas, ways of tackling structural challenges in rural areas through mergers and inter-municipal cooperation, the representation of urban and rural interests by local government associations, as well as the role that local authorities play in intergovernmental conferences.

Karl Kössler is Senior Researcher and Group Leader at the Institute for Comparative Federalism of Eurac Research Bolzano/Bozen (Italy). He received a Ph.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) in 2011. Due to his background in both comparative public law and political science, Karl Kössler's research adopts a multidisciplinary perspective. His teaching includes a wide range of courses at universities, master programs and summer schools in Europe, Africa and Asia. Moreover, Karl Kössler is the author of over 50 academic publications with prestigious publishers such as Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Edward Elgar, Hart and Oxford University Press. This includes nine books, among them Comparative Federalism: Constitutional Arrangements and Case Law (coauthored with Francesco Palermo). The latter book has received acclaim from both political scientists and lawyers as “a work of reference for generations of scholars” (Prof. Balveer Arora) and as“standing out for its iconoclasm, for its illuminating and entertaining selection of illustrative examples, but most of all for a significant methodological breakthrough” (Prof. James Gardner). Karl Kössler’s consultancy activities for policymakers have covered a wide range of constitutional and political reform projects with assignments ranging from several European countries to Mozambique and Papua New Guinea. In 2018, he was appointed as Alternate Member of the Council of Europe’s Group of Independent Experts on the European Charter of Local Self-Government. His work has obtained third-party funding from private foundations and the European Union. Since 2019 Karl Kössler is the Scientific Coordinator of the five-year EU Horizon 2020 project “Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay (LoGov)”, which brings together 18 partner institutions from around the world .