How much can group projects between cities help them in the long term?

When politicians and researchers mention policy in “urban” areas, we might imagine bustling metropolises where millions of people live. However, in a world where most people live in urban areas, about one in three live in small municipalities with fewer than 500,000 residents. These smaller cities have smaller tax bases and fewer city staff. Nevertheless, residents still need municipal services such as timely public transit, well-maintained public areas, and adequate waste disposal. When smaller cities fail to provide adequate services like water management, emergencies like the 2014-2020 water crisis of Flint, Michigan, can occur. To create effective urban policy, planners must think about solving the issues facing these small settlements in general. 

Small cities have generally approached this problem in the past with one of two responses. They either must selectively spend money and risk leaving residents with gaps in the quality of public services, or agree to be absorbed into neighboring cities and risk their sense of identity or ability to meet residents’ unique needs. However, municipalities might have a third option: intermunicipal cooperation (IMC). In this option, officials from different municipalities might form partnerships or governments might sign agreements to work with each other. This includes forming specialized teams to work across borders, pooling people and money for regional work, or coordinating regulations across multiple towns to provide better and more streamlined services. 

Early research has shown that the benefits of IMC for small municipalities have outweighed the logistical and financial costs of collaboration in the short-term. A recent article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health expanded on these findings by analyzing the long-term consequences of IMCs. Drs. Struk and Bakoš of Masaryk University looked at municipalities in the Czech Republic over a decade from 2010 to 2019. The Czech Republic is especially appealing for examining services in small municipalities as it’s mostly fragmented into urban areas of fewer than 20,000 residents. Among the 664 municipalities examined, 93 participated in IMCs and pooled their resources with other municipalities during the studied time period. 

This study focused on an essential service that every city must consider: waste management. In the Czech Republic, the burden of this service is placed upon local governments, which allows for comparison of services between municipalities that participated in IMC and those that didn’t. To facilitate this comparison, Drs. Struk and Bakoš collected municipal data on population size, waste management cost, and participation in an IMC for waste management.  

The researchers sought to determine two things: does participation in an IMC reduce the cost of waste management for small municipalities, and how much benefit does IMC participation create in the long term? They found that towns participating in IMC spent less money on waste management per resident each year. These savings averaged about 13.5 percent annually – a significant amount for small municipalities seeking to stretch their funding any way they can. Municipalities participating in IMC also benefitted by sharing costs while gaining higher-quality services. For example, small budgets could be pooled to pay for larger projects or more professional waste management teams. Representatives even reported that waste management companies responded more quickly to their needs because a group of small municipalities carries more weight than a single one.  

When faced with limitations, small municipalities can work together to provide cheaper, higher-quality, and quicker versions of a public service like waste management over the long-term. This long-term use of IMC could mean higher quality and more efficient municipal services for nearly one-third of global citizens.