Amalgamations and Flanders… Will it ever be anything?

Municipal mergers and other forms of scale reforms keep dominating the political agenda in several European countries (and even beyond). This is also the case in the Dutch speaking region of Belgium, Flanders, where the current government wants to stimulate voluntary mergers in the coming years. It is often believed that these reforms increase the efficiency of the involved municipalities significantly. These reforms are motivated by a certain search for efficiency. Thereby one assumes that municipalities, after a reform, will gain from economies of scale, deliver cheaper services to their citizens and know a faster decision making. Particularly the argument of economies of scale is adopted from the private sector. The more units produced, the lower the average cost. All too often, those benefits are summarized under the label of ‘efficiency’. However, the question arises whether this is also true in practice. Different studies (in several European countries) have shown that a lot of questions can be raised about these arguments. A recent Dutch study (from the University of Groningen, 2013) revealed that amalgamation does not lead to lower spending. Similar findings were done in Denmark and in Sweden (Christoffersen & Bo Larsen, 2007; Hanes, 2015). And then we didn’t even mentioned the consequences for local democracy. In this contribution we outline the current Flemish context and we place it against more international findings. In that way we hope to broaden the debates in Flanders and nurture it with those international findings.