Abstract & Overview
The article deals with cooperation between municipalities in Poland, focusing on the inter-communal unions, being the most popular form of inter-municipal cooperation in Poland. The objective is to explore the scope of cooperation among unionised municipalities in Poland, to identify the factors influencing the probability of involvement in this form of cooperation and to investigate the relation between scope of cooperation within intercommunal-unions and their potential to support the regional green transformation. We employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. In the qualitative component, we produced a synthesis of cooperation areas through coding of registered activities. In the quantitative analysis we estimated a logistic regression model to identify the factors influencing the likelihood of municipality’s membership in an inter-communal union. Although inter-communal unions are declaratively established mainly for cost-intensive activities, such as construction and maintenance of physical infrastructure, we identified two pathways of cooperation through the estimation of the statistical model: the resource-constraint pathway and the collaborative capacity pathway. Finally, we investigated the potential of inter-communal unions to support the regional green transformation. The analysis showed that in four out of five analysed regions the quantity and scope of activity of inter-communal unions can significantly foster the green transformation on regional scale.