Brave New World: Density, Intensity, Commitment, Diversity and Innovation in Local Governance Arrangements

Local governance arrangements entail the capacity to engage in strategic partnerships to address a wide range of activities and tasks, to target strategic and cross-cutting problems; or may revolve around precise goals within one single policy area without a multisectoral approach to deal with the region’s development problems. Local governance arrangements can optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of service and program delivery at the local level. Regardless of their specific aims, local governance arrangements can embrace different formats – from more institutionalized to highly loose partnerships. This research seeks to map the wide spectrum of local governance arrangements across unitary European countries. In specific, borrowing concepts from scholarly literature within social network analysis, this article seeks to chart the density, intensity, commitment, diversity and innovation within Portuguese local governance arrangements. 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. Overall, 16 municipalities websites were content-analysed, with 165 networks (and 4390 actors) having been identified. Networks formal statutes and internal rules were fully scoped to gather information regarding the diversity of participants (diversity); formal relationships with higher education institutions (innovation); frequency of formal interactions (intensity); the degree to which local networks were self-organized, as opposed to centrally driven (commitment) and group cohesion and ties with each member of the network (density).