Estructura institucional y organización territorial local en España: fragmentación municipal, asociacionismo confuso, grandes ciudades y provincias supervivientes

Abstract

This paper offers a vision of the local structures in Spain, a country with a large number of municipalities (more than 8.110) without any policy addressed to the rationalization and simplification of such fragmentation. The local associationism has proved to be a mostly anarchic movement, where municipalities make arrangements for very different reasons and delivering all kind of services, but without a common pattern. Even more, a large number of “mancomunidades” (voluntary associations of municipalities) actually doesn’t work and exists only in theory.
This fragmented local map is very unbalanced because almost 40 per cent of the Spanish population lives in a small group of 62 municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, which represent the core of the local power in Spain. The traditionally uniform Spanish local legal framework –based in the French model- has introduced for the first time a specific model for the largest cities in 2003, taking into account the complexity of their government and governance context. Also the two main Spanish cities –Madrid and Barcelona– have special laws approved by the Spanish Parliament in 2006.
Nevertheless, the Spanish functional metropolitan areas present a low institutional profile due to the resistance of the Autonomous Communities –the regional level with legislative powers to establish or suppress them– to institutionalize these urban areas as they are perceived mostly as political competitors. Finally, the traditional second local level, the province, has experienced a substantial cutback of its competences after the establishment of the Autonomous Communities in 1979-1983. In theory, the main role of the province is the economical, technical and legal cooperation with the small and medium size municipalities, but actually this role could be implemented by the Autonomous Communities, and the provinces means an arena for the political clientelism and a privileged and comfortable space for the local political elites that could perfectly be suppressed, especially in a context of deep economic crisis and reduction of public resources.