Brothers in Arms: Scoping the Architecture and Intensity of Local Collaborative Arrangements

Local governance arrangements are increasingly seen as the ‘big idea’ to cope with issues that are complex enough in scope and scale to require a diversity of expertise and resources. Defied by political, social, economic and demographic challenges, local governments have been forced to operate within a diverse range of formal or informal structures of exchange and production with other government agencies at different levels – central, regional, and local –, privatized utilities, private companies, voluntary organizations and interest groups. The rise of a wide plethora of governance arrangements triggered an academic interest in assessing both the choice of the architecture and intensity of collaborative arrangements, and the strengths and limitations of the repertoire of tools of regional governance. However, research has yet provided a coherent analytical framework to comparatively map and assess the complexity of these arrangements. This article seeks to map the wide spectrum of local governance arrangements, focusing on institutionalized alliances, across all policy domains, and mapping their functioning in terms of autonomy, group coherence and relevance, using Teles (forthcoming) grid-group typology. Empirically, this article presents an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese case, where local government is kept tightly under the radar of central government. In order to scope all range of these arrangements, we will follow a stratified sampling procedure, so as to take into account the heterogeneity of municipalities, considering both their population density and the urban/ rural divide.