Exploring the Strategic Region: Rationality, Context, and Institutional Collective Action

The article elaborates the concept of strategic regions which refers to bottom-up processes of inter-local cooperation. In a larger number of countries strategic regions are viewed as an attractive strategy to assist local governments in their pursuit or managing increasing costs in service delivery. In this article we first critically inspect rational choice-based models of interlocal cooperation and point out a couple of issues where they can be further refined and elaborated. Here, we focus particularly on the logic of incentives and transaction costs pertaining to the selection of tasks for collective action; the configuration of the actors; and the democratic deficit issue. The article then discusses alternative schemas for explanation of the formation or non-formation of inter-local partnerships; collective history, local identities and “bounded rationality” may prescribe or prevent partnership formation.