Local Climate Policies as a New Field for Inter-Municipal Cooperation

Over the last years, the topic of climate change policies and their instruments is emerging in the framework of the public debate on all political levels. Scientists and media stipulate that we are able to influence environmental processes at all levels: from an individual to the global one. Among all actors involved in this kind of policies, the role of local administration and its climate policies is gaining more and more attention and importance. The number of local governments declaring fight against climate change in their political agendas and budgetary plans is rapidly growing. Yet, this type of actions had been implemented in local governments for many years (e.g. waste management) and today it is simply re-labeled as climate change policies. This trend is stimulated by the access to the European Funds supporting climate change projects. However, in depth-studies show that the efficiency of local undertakings in this area is relatively often questioned by the Polish decision makers, who put forward the argument of too small territorial and financial scale of local undertakings. One of possible solutions to overcome the problem of low impact of the actions conducted by local administration is to act in the framework of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). It enables to profit from the economy of scale in financial terms. It also increases the chance to achieve a broader synergy effect and to cover the whole area touched with a problem (eg. river basin). In our research we ask about the size of those two phenomena: (i) realizing local climate policies under the framework of IMC and (ii) re-labeling “old” policies related to environmental protection. The hypothesis behind this question is that IMC seems a perfect tool for climate related policies, and as such is used frequently. Our empirical findings are based on a study of IMC conducted in Poland in 2016-2019. Our study has two stages. First, on a quantitative level, it illustrates the number and thematic scope of different forms of inter-municipal cooperation institutions in Poland. Referring to the financial data and a survey conducted amongst inter-municipal companies we endeavour to answer the question on the propensity of local governments environmental cooperation. Second, on the qualitative level, we refer to the data collected during three case studies of inter-municipal companies dealing with waste management in different regions of the country and try to answer the question on purring the old wine into new bottles.