Local autonomy in the 21st century

This book is the proceedings of the conference in Vilnius, organizaed by the Observatory on Local Autonomy (OLA: www.ola-europe.com) in partnership with the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR: www.ccre.org) on 'Local Autonomy in Europe'. Its aim is to iffer legal, political, and mangerial vision of the organization of local governments in Europe with the objective of establishing a typology of local administration systems. This is because it is pointless to provide concrete comparisions of local public service administration and its management in Europe without having adequate knowledge of the current situation. Taking stock of what is already in place consists of establishing a purely statistica (and thus theoretical) vision of the way municipalities and regions are divided up so that it is possible to study the current state of local governemnt systems and their evolution in light of the numerous reforms currently under way both in terms of the division of powers and responsibilities between national and local government and the division of material, human and financial (including tax) resources.