Strategic Regions of Tension Between Democratic Governance and Efficiency, 2009

The regions has long been a hot issue. This applies as well in the discourse on keeping political reforms as conditions for the development of sustainable regions. The starting point for this project is that in the shadow of these discourses is the outcome a comprehensive set of collaborative efforts across municipal boundaries. Our aim is to shed light on the emergence, organization and effectiveness of the inter-municipal cooperation measures that constitute the pillars of our concept of strategic regions. Central here is the relationship between effective problem solving and democratic legitimation. The project thus aims to analyze a type of regional "governance" that does not at least have importance in the production of services that individual municipalities are struggling to cope on its own and where partnership organization appears to be a suitable alternative. The dataset is anonymized.