Building Trust within Inter-Municipal Cooperation

In many EU countries Local government is characterized by high administrative fragmentation and the prevalence of Small Local Government Organizations. These facts affect significantly the capacity of innovation of Local Government and make it difficult to carry out rationalization projects aiming at increasing its efficiency and effectiveness. By allowing the implementation of systematic forms of resource sharing within aggregations of municipalities, inter-municipal cooperation could be a possible solution to the problem of administrative fragmentation. Actually, by sharing an appropriate cooperation environment, the members of an inter-municipal cooperation could achieve levels of strict interoperability, both on the technological and the organizational level. An aggregation of Local Government Organizations that are strictly interoperable, can carry out a process of virtual integration among the partners, up to the activation of an Integrated System of Local Government (ISLG), that is a stable network of Local Government Organizations cooperating in a non-episodic way. In the paper we will describe a possible solution to the problem of administrative fragmentation based on the concept of ISLG. In particular, after introducing the concept of ISLG, the paper describes how inter-organizational relations can be strengthened (up to the virtual integration of the partners in an ISLG) through a learning process in which the partners engage in a series of iterative and interactive learning cycles, characterized by greater and greater trust and adaptive flexibility, as well as the willingness to make increasing and irreversible commitments. The concept of trust can be considered as one of the main elements which can lead the evolution of an inter-municipal cooperation towards a system of virtually integrated organizations. Starting from the definitions of trust referred to in Organization Theory, the paper presents the classification of some trust relations which are important within an inter-municipal cooperation and considers some technological and organizational elements which can be used to support the creation, the maintenance and the strengthening of trust among the partners of an inter-municipal cooperation.