1: Introduction: motives for revisiting inter-municipal cooperation; Filipe Teles and Pawel Swianiewicz.- Section One - Drivers, Democracy and Delivery.- 2: Inter-municipal cooperation and austerity policies: obstacles or opportunities?; Ringa Raudla and António Tavares.- 3: Actors in inter-municipal cooperation; Pawel Swianiewicz.- 4:A borrowed mandate? Democratic legitimacy of inter-municipal entities - a comparative analysis; Adam Gendzwill and Marta Lackowska.- 5: Striving for local governance capacity in Portugal and Spain; Patrícia Silva and Esther Pano.- 6: Reasons for inter-municipal cooperation: A comparative analysis of Finland, Iceland and Norway; Grétar Thór Eythórsson, Pekka Kettunen, and Jan Erling Klausen.- Section Two - Cooperation in Europe.- 7: Inter-municipal cooperation in France: a continuous reform, new trends; Robert Hertzog.- 8: Inter-municipal cooperation in the Netherlands; Pieter-Jan Klok, Marcel Boogers, Bas Denters, Maurits Sanders.- 9: Inter-municipal cooperation in Switzerland; Reto Steiner and Claire Kaiser.- 10: Traditions, problems and challenges of inter-municipal cooperation in the German federal state of Brandenburg; Jochen Franzke.- 11: Bigger and stronger together: How Icelandic municipalities solve their lack of capacity and scale economy; Grétar Thór Eythórsson.- 12: Inter-local financial transfers as a measure of cooperation in Poland; Julita Lukomska and Katarzyna Szmigiel-Rawska.- 13: Inter-municipal cooperation in Slovenia: an intermediate step towards regionalization; Irena Baclija-Brajnik.- 14: Layer upon layer: the position of inter-municipal cooperation in the Spanish quasi-federal system - the case of Catalonia; Esther Pano Puey, Lluis Medir Tejado, Carla Puiggròs Mussons and Jaume Magre Ferran.- Section Three - Success and failure: case-studies.- 15: The rise and fall of the union: a case in Poland; Pawel Swianiewicz and Adam Gendzwill.- 16: The architecture of a complex system: the Oradea Metropolitan Area in Romania; Cristina Stanu?.- 17: Korça Waste Management and the territorial reform in Albania; Alba Dakoli Wilson .- 18: Mapping the success: inter-municipal cooperation in two Czech Micro-regions; Jakub Lysek and Pavel Saradín.- 19: Can tiny municipalities survive through extensive IMC arrangements? The case of Iceland; Eva Marín Hlynsdóttir.- 20: Conclusion: Inter-municipal cooperation diversity, evolution and future research agenda; Pawel Swianiewicz and Filipe Teles.
