Regional Politics in the Netherlands

Regional politics as such does not exist in the Netherlands. The national debate about the governance of regional challenges – i.e. between the provincial and the municipal level – has never lead to the establishment of regional government. So the main vehicle for regional governance is intermunicipal cooperation, embodied in intermunicipal cooperatives (IMCs) or more informal cooperation arrangements. Although no reliable figures about the total number of intermunicipal cooperatives and arrangements are available, it is clear that the phenomenon has steadily increased in the last decades. In all of these arrangements the municipal executives are dominant in the regional decision-making process, but how decisions are made and interests are weighted has not been studied. In the IMCs based on public law local councils have limited powers to be informed and consulted about budgets and policy proposals, but all research shows that local councillors experience little influence and a lot of distance to the regional processes. This apparent lack of democratic legitimacy of intermunicipal governance has often been mentioned but no easy solutions exist.