EURA Working Group on Recentralisation – News June 2024

The working group had a first workshop at the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary) on 18 and 19 April 2024.

The group agreed at this event on a paper on What the working group on “Recentralization in countries experiencing an ‘illiberal turn’” is about? and that the work will start from two typologies – one of recentralization policies, and one of local reactions to these policies. These typologies have been elaborated in the paper The multiple faces of recentralization: A typology of central-local interactions written by Aksztejn et al. which has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs.

The next workshop will take place at the Institute of Political Science in Darmstadt on 8 and 9 November 2024. Until then…

• the Polish team will: present a sample for country chapters to be published in a journal;
• all national teams will:
  • update the scores of the Local Autonomy Index (LAI) until 2023 for their respective country
  • create an overview of the decentralisation measures in their respective country, and
  • place these measures on a timeline and assign them to the various dimensions of local autonomy they have targeted at;
• an outline for (comparative) studies of the counter-reaction of local governments to the recentralisation measures of national governments will be prepared.