Gebiets- und Verwaltungsstrukturen im Umbruch

Far-reaching measures of administrative restructuring are being often introduced in the face of demographic change and the financial diffculties of the municipalities and federal states. Only with larger entities, it is argued, will it in future be possible to provide high quality municipal services at a reasonable cost. The tendency to enlarge municipal entities fits with the overall picture of municipal reforms in Germany, which since 1945 have been dominated by measures associated with concentration and centralisation efforts. Territorial restructuring is, however, but one element of the entire spectrum of administrative reforms. Further elements of administrative (re)structuring are the reform of the portfolio of public tasks (critical review of public tasks), the transfer of responsibilities between the levels (functional reform), and a change in the specifications of financing regulations relevant to services assigned to the public sector (financing reform). This publication consists of the results of the working group “Administrative and Territorial Reforms” (AG VGR) of the state working groups Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and Thüringen of the Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (ARL). A significant objective of the AG VGR was to shed more light on the spatially-related interactions of the effects of administrative reform measures, as there are few findings on the topic that are empirically well-founded and many questions remain unanswered.