Mellankommunal samverkan – är det värt det?

En explorativ ansats

Abstract

Intermunicipal cooperation – is it worth it?

As the case has been in several other countries, in Sweden, intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) has increased dramatically throughout the past three decades. Actors within the state as well as local government have had high expectations about what IMC may accomplish, ranging from increasing quality of services to lowering costs and facilitating recruitment of expertise. However, there is a dearth of evaluations done on whether IMC actually fulfills such promises in the Swedish context. Against this backdrop, we have conducted a survey directed to municipality executive officers in those 61 municipalities that have formalized cooperation in the area of planning, environment and supervision. Overall, positive experiences are reported: a vast majority perceive that quality of services increase and recruitment is facilitated. However, generally, they do generally not report that costs decrease, but do state that steering becomes more cumbersome with IMC. Considering that we employ a most likely-design, the relatively negative findings on costs, as well the observation that host municipalities report more positive experiences than non-host municipalities, our results are intriguing and highlight the need for deepened studies on these particular issues.