Institutional and organizational solutions for associated management, embodying cooperation, differ in the degree of opportunity they offer in ensuring long-term stability and integration of forms of political and organizational representation.
The development of cooperative solutions must be accompanied by widespread consensus on the values that support its pursuit and a structured set of knowledge that, first, makes the purpose of associating governance and management systems concrete and well-argued, and secondly, after the initiation of an associative experience, contributes to managing its ongoing operation.
Maintaining cooperative momentum requires careful consideration of:
- The impacts of selected solutions in terms of consequences on entity budgets, service quality, and decision-making processes.
- Conditions in terms of professionalism, economic-financial and technological resources required.
- The operational phases of implementing planned changes.
It is emphasized that the implementation of feasibility studies, regardless of the success achieved in realizing a cooperative solution, allows for reflection on the most appropriate methods of enhancing the adequacy of administrative action, thus constituting a factor in the growth of municipal competencies in improving and innovating management and policy systems.
The “frontline” interventions of AnciLab experts ensure:
- Achievement of predefined objectives within a specified time frame with reference to specific outcome indicators defined at the start of the intervention.
- Speed in project initiation and achievement of results.
- Development of internal expertise capable of consolidating and further expanding innovation.
- Our experience
Municipal Mergers: A Radical Institutional Transformation
Our expertise stems from numerous experiences of radical institutional change. Municipal mergers represent a radical institutional transformation that involves profound changes to political bodies, resulting in a reduction in the number of bodies and elected representatives, as well as organizational, technological, and active arrangements, involving evolutionary modifications to local cultural and social identities.
This profound, complete, and definitive form of administrative integration, which extensively involves local communities, can result in the creation of a new municipality from two or more existing ones, or the incorporation of one or more municipalities into an incorporating municipality that retains its legal personality, succeeding in all respects to the incorporated one, whose administrative bodies are dissolved following a specific regional law.
Breaking down the merger process into phases is useful to facilitate action for:
- Dimensioning and balancing objectives and necessary resources as accurately as possible.
- Clearly focusing on the framework of responsibilities involved.
- Anticipating critical events, seizing opportunities, maximizing benefits, and avoiding the emergence of possible disadvantages.
Experiences in initiating mergers between municipalities have shown that the transition from a phase of general interest to concrete activation of institutional and organizational change processes is accompanied by strong, coordinated, and determined action by local political actors who take responsibility for deepening and promoting reflections on the opportunity to initiate a merger process. The establishment and evolution of this action group are strongly influenced by the availability of a structured set of knowledge, which represents a necessary investment to ensure the production of effects not only in the short term but also in the medium and long term as more adequate references regarding the merit of the merger choice.
The long-term perspective, spanning multiple generations, must be assumed as a fundamental point of view to assess the true value of the merger choice as a solution capable of responding to epochal needs better than alternatives where the maintenance of current territorial administrative arrangements is envisaged.
AnciLab aims to be a partner of municipal administrations in carrying out activities to certify the existing situation, in order to provide the merger process with a reliable reference point of the situation; focusing on the nature of criticalities, opportunities, advantages, and disadvantages in the initial phases and ongoing operation of the new municipality, through the drafting of exhaustive feasibility studies.
