On New Year's Day 2024, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula on the west coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami. Several municipalities on the peninsula were devastated, with 230 people killed and more than 50,000 houses damaged. The area was damaged across the board, and support from the prefecture and the national government, was essential. However, several factors combined to slow the subsequent recovery (Guardian, 2024). One of these is related to IGR.

Japan is a unitary sovereign state with a three-tier system of local government - national, prefectural, and municipal - a Napoleonic (Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2019) local system built 130 years ago, learning from Prussia and France. Following constitutional reforms after World War II, the Ministry of the Interior was dismantled, and the posts of prefecture governors were changed to an elected position, with reforms in the 2000s further decentralizing power from the State to the prefectures and municipalities. In addition, Japan has “a fused local system” (Agata, Inatsugu and Shiroyama, 2024), whereby ministries and agencies rarely have a local agency in each local area, but instead delegate their work to prefectures and municipalities. For example, many welfare-related tasks are delegated to municipalities, and passporting tasks delegated to prefectures are also delegated to municipalities in some prefectures. Therefore, in addition to the original municipal tasks, municipalities also carry out tasks delegated by the national government and tasks delegated by the prefecture, which is a fusion of independent and delegated tasks.

Japan was one of the countries that took the appropriate action regarding covid19. Despite only calling for self-restraint among the population without a lockdown, the number of deaths per population was the lowest among OECD countries. Many assess that a multi-layered policy process (Bergstrom, Kuhlmann and Laffin, 2022) was underway between national and local governments. However, it does not appear to have worked well during the Noto Peninsula earthquake. Why does a model that worked during covid19 not work well for the earthquake, which are natural hazards? This paper uses interviews with stakeholders and survey analysis to examine the factors that lead to dysfunctional intergovernmental relations in Japan, comparing pandemic and natural disasters.

The climate crisis, migration crisis, or the COVID-19 pandemic are just recent examples of today’s global societal challenges (Mukaram et al., 2021). Many of these challenges or wicked problems increasingly have to be managed at the local level (Geuijen et al., 2017). These challenges are crosscutting existing policy domains and municipal boundaries, making traditional governance models less suitable (Head & Alford, 2015; De Wulf et al., 2023). Moreover, in the Netherlands, the responsibilities of local governments strongly increased due to the decentralization of social care services from the national to the local level (Jansen et al., 2021). Thus, the complexity of tasks of local governments increases, and their role in finding solutions is ever-growing (De Wulf et al., 2023).

In practice, we observe Dutch municipalities experimenting with new internal organization designs shifting towards more integrated governance models, since their current silos are incapable of dealing with these wicked, domain-crossing problems. Since 2012, these more integrated governance models, in which public services are clustered around specific types of citizens or tasks to address their specific needs in an integrated way, have gained popularity in Dutch municipalities (Van der Heijden & Kraijo, 2020). Systematic knowledge is lacking on what these models actually look like, if they work and why they work (Whitford et al., 2020). Within the field of public administration a considerable amount of research is available concerning the governance of specific public services, and the cooperation between municipalities and other stakeholders, but research on organizational structures of municipalities is relatively sparse (cf. Whitford et al., 2020). Yet, the potential gains of having a better understanding of organizational structures may be considerable, both for citizens and the municipal organizations involved.

In this paper we explore the new integrated governance models of 20 Dutch municipalities (varying in size, culture and geographical location) with the aim of giving a first overview of forms of integral governance existing in practice and their relation to existing literature on new public governance (e.g., policy coordination and integration; collaborative governance). By conducting semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we map the forms of integrated governance and their structures. Starting predominantly from the empirical data, we combine abductive theory generation, as well as theory development (Toshkov, 2016). We find that the integrated governance models share some prominent characteristics, namely ‘collaborating with external partners’, ‘cross-cutting domains internally’, and ‘starting at the societal task’. Interestingly, we also find broad variety among the municipalities regarding their definition of wicked societal tasks, their approach in centering their work around these tasks, and the transformation processes towards integrated governance. Based on our empirical findings we present a research agenda with both empirical and theoretical research questions.

In 2019, the Flemish government forced its municipalities to integrate their social services into the municipal government structure. Until then, the social services of the local governments had always been imbedded in separate local governments (i.e. Public Centres for Social Welfare, PSSW), each with their own legal person, elected councils and administrative structure. The PSSWs were established in 1976 (out of even older institutions for social welfare) to protect the citizens’ rights for social services (particularly related to living wages). However, in the following decades, the PSSWs accumulated more and more competencies related to the broader welfare policy (e.g. elderly policy, family policy, health policy, legal assistance, etc.). In fact, in some municipalities, these PSSWs were larger (and richer) than the municipalities themselves. Interestingly, some aspects of social policy were traditionally reserved for the municipalities (e.g. childcare policy, education, etc.), which created a complicated division of social competencies between the municipalities and the PSSWs. Due to the increasing complexity of the social policy field, the social services of the PSSWs and the municipalities started to overlap more and more. The Flemish government wanted to integrate these two governments, and, in the process, integrate the social services of the local government.

Amalgamating two local governments, however, does not guarantee an integration of their (social) services. The amalgamated governments might, for instance, each retain their own social services and administrative bodies governing these services. This paper analyses the extent to which the amalgamation has resulted in integrated social services, and which conditions explain the presence or absence of these integrated services. In other words, we try to explain the successfulness of the amalgamation for the integration of social services. In doing so, we consider four conditions that may, in combination, lead to integrated social services: 1) the size of the municipality, 2) the level of collaboration between the administrative body for social services of the PSSW and the other municipal services, 3) the level of structural integration of this administrative body in the municipality, and 4) the level of integration of the social policy. We hypothesize that it will be particularly the large municipalities with a high level of collaboration, and structural and social policy integration between PSSW and municipality that will be successful at creating integrated social services, as these municipalities have sufficient capacity to connect the social services of both governments and introduce new and integrated services.

We test this hypothesis qualitatively on a rich dataset of more than 90 surveys and interviews from 30 Flemish municipalities. Respondents from the political level (i.e. majors and their deputies), the top management of the administration (i.e. general manager and members of the management team), and the operational level of the administration (e.g. social workers) were included in the data collection. We analyzed the data using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses. The results uncover surprising properties of the amalgamation process and how it leads to integrated services. For instance, the results show the special importance of the municipal size and level of social policy integration for the creation of integrated social services. More surprisingly, however, is that some municipalities can also create integrated social services regardless of the structural integration of the PSSW in the municipality and without high levels of social policy integration, as long as they have an intense collaboration with the social workers of the (former) PSSW. This allows for a lot of nuance into how structurally integrated amalgamated governments should be in order to foster integrated service delivery, and it places the connective capacities of municipalities in the spotlight. Further implications are discussed in the paper.

Most top-level managers in public organizations are deeply involved in policy processes, either through setting the political agenda, preparing and proposing decision alternatives for politicians, implementing policies, and by evaluating the same policies. The extensive – and sometimes intensive – interaction between these top-level bureaucrats and politicians is also a potential source of conflict between the two spheres. Although administrators are formally subordinate to the political level, a meritocratic system like the Norwegian grant managers a high degree of “job security”. Top managers are hired “for life”, or at least for a period spanning at least two elections, shielding them from direct political threats and granting them the right to propose policy alternatives they know are going to be disliked by the current dominating political coalition.

Still, municipal managers must constantly relate to the political sphere, and thus characteristics of that sphere will probably affect managerial work substantially. One such characteristic that become more prominent over the last decades is political fragmentation, i.e., more political parties and shrinking support for traditional "governing parties". Working from two different perspectives - that of the professional manager and that of prinicipal.agent theory - we deduct two competing hypotheses concerning political fragmentation and managerial turnover.

Using a data set of shifts of CMEs in the period from 2009to 2019 covering fourelection periods, and we link CME shifts in political fragmentation in the municipal council and executive following each election. First, we see if there is a tendency for turnover to increase over the period. Second, we conduct a panel data, logistic regression with random effects for the whole period with turnover of CME as the dependent variable. These shifts are then coupled to a) the number of political parties in the council, b) the effective number of parties in the council, and c) if mayor and deputy-mayor comes from the same political bloc (a measure of fragmentation in the executive). Several control variables are included as well.