Local governments govern not only territories, services and resources, but also places with distinctive histories, identities and senses of belonging. Yet comparative local government research has paid considerably more attention to institutional design, territorial scale, capacity, efficiency and decentralisation than to the relationship between local identity and governance. This panel proposes to bring local identity into the comparative study of local government by examining how public institutions interact with, preserve, reshape and sometimes disrupt the uniqueness of places and communities.
The question has become particularly important amid municipal amalgamations, decentralisation reforms, urbanisation, demographic change and growing competition between places. Territorial reforms may improve administrative capacity while simultaneously weakening established community identities. Conversely, strong local identities may shape citizens' attitudes towards institutional reforms, participation, trust and local autonomy. Local governments may also actively mobilise uniqueness through cultural policies, place branding, participatory institutions and development strategies.
The panel invites comparative, theoretical and empirical contributions examining local identity as both a condition of governance and a potential governance resource. It seeks to connect scholarship on local government and territorial reform with research on place, identity and belonging, and to explore whether a broader framework of governing local uniqueness can help explain variation in local democratic and administrative outcomes.
Potential questions include: How do territorial reforms transform local identities? How does local identity influence trust, participation and perceptions of local government? Can administrative boundaries create or weaken communities of belonging? How do local governments construct and mobilise narratives of uniqueness? Does local autonomy facilitate the preservation of local identity? How do tensions between administrative efficiency and community identity affect territorial reform? Under what conditions can local uniqueness become a resource for democratic governance, development and community resilience?
By bringing these questions together, the panel aims to establish local identity as a more explicit dimension of comparative local government research and stimulate a research agenda on the relationship between institutions, territory, community and place.
