Conference Agenda

Inter-municipal cooperation has become an increasingly prevalent governance strategy across Europe, enabling municipalities to jointly provide services for mutual benefit. These cooperative arrangements manifest in diverse and evolving forms, shaped significantly by political leadership and administrative traditions. A primary rationale behind such cooperation is the pursuit of economies of scale; however, these gains are counterbalanced by substantial transaction costs and institutional risks borne by the individual municipalities.

Land management, as a fundamental aspect of municipal land policy, enables local authorities to actively govern the distribution of land. It involves complex negotiations between public and private actors and encompasses a range of land types, including residential, commercial, infrastructure, and compensation areas. While land management is frequently framed as a tool to curb land consumption, its inter-municipal implementation is increasingly scrutinized, particularly regarding its effectiveness in reducing land consumption.

Bringing together perspectives from public management and spatial planning, this study adopts an interdisciplinary lens to examine inter-municipal cooperation and land management in the context of decentralized governance and sustainable settlement development. Specifically, it applies a second-generation rational choice approach—the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) Framework—to address two central research questions:

• What motivations and institutional structures characterise inter-municipal cooperation and land management in varying spatial contexts?
• To what extent do factors such as population density, involvement of private actors, and public funding programs influence their emergence?

The empirical analysis is based on 64 case studies derived from a nationwide online survey, further enriched by publicly available statistical data. These cases were analyzed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify patterns and subsequently deepened through semi-structured expert interviews.

The findings underscore the predominance of economic considerations in driving inter-municipal cooperation and land management. Furthermore, they reveal the critical role of targeted incentives in overcoming institutional and financial barriers, particularly in rural contexts. Two principal patterns emerge from the analysis:

• In high-density municipalities, strong personal leadership constitutes a central enabling factor. Additionally, external support through funding programs or strategic engagement with private actors contributes significantly to the effectiveness of inter-municipal cooperation and land management.
• In rural municipalities, where the relative benefits of cooperation are often outweighed by transaction costs, the emergence of inter-municipal arrangements depends heavily on the involvement of private actors, access to funding, knowledge transfer mechanisms, and committed local leadership.

These findings contribute to a broader understanding of cooperation dynamics in multi-level yet decentralised governance systems. While municipalities in urbanised areas are more likely to engage in cooperation due to spatial development pressures and reduced reliance on external incentives, rural municipalities require a combination of supporting conditions to render cooperation viable.

In conclusion, the study highlights the need to design incentive structures and compensation mechanisms that mitigate dependency on private actors and better align inter-municipal cooperation with the normative goals of sustainable and integrated spatial development.

Reducing land take is a major challenge for spatial planning in many European countries. Therefore, the European Commission has introduced the target of „No Net Land Take“ (NNLT) in the Roadmap to a Resource-Efficient Europe (2011) (European Commission 2011). NNLT aims to avoid, minimize, or compensate any new land take by 2050 (European Commission 2021). This ambitious target requires translation into national policy and legislation. Various countries have already taken measures to curb land consumption (Hartmann/Hengstermann/Jehling et al. 2025). In many countries, the discussion is shaped by an instrumental approach (Eichhorn/Adam/Schürholt et al. 2024). However, it is often observed that such an instrumental approach tends to disregard the international perspective.

This contribution presents and discusses the political narratives and key mechanisms of action behind different such policies in different European countries, namely Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Czechia. The overview is methodologically based on the institutional policy analysis by Peter Knoepfel et al. (Knoepfel 2007), which is related to actor-centered institutionalism. The analysis considers three elements: 1. The political perception of the problem; 2. The collective hypothesis about the cause of the problem; and 3. The main intervention. For each of these elements, the arguments of the dominant national discourses are presented. Whether the respective political assumptions (e.g., concerning the nature of the problem) align with actual spatial realities will not be questioned – political discourses may indeed deviate. Overall, this approach makes it possible to reveal the key mechanisms of action and the political narrative behind planning-related initiatives. The results are based on a focus group study (2019), findings from the international working group of the ARL on “Land Policies in Europe” (2020–2024), as well as complementary expert interviews and literature reviews.

The comparison of the different countries shows how various national debates on land-take have often developed independently from the European NNLT policy. Also the significant role of property rights in the implementation of strategies to reduce land take can be demonstrated. Finally, while the original political objectives regarding land-take are often quite ambitious, it can be observed that they become increasingly flexible as they are translated into concrete measures. As a result, there is a growing polarization between socio-demographic growth and strict environmental goals in the current political context of many European countries.

Achieving No Net Land Take (NNLT) by 2050 is a key planning objective across many European regions. In Wallonia (Belgium), urban development continues to pressure land resources, despite efforts promoting densification. Historically shaped by suburban expansion and decentralised governance, the region faces ongoing challenges in limiting land take. While business-as-usual (BAU) projections anticipate a gradual decline in expansion, recent trends suggest this may be overly optimistic. To assess the long-term impact of spatial policies, this study contrasts BAU with a Growth-As-Usual (GAU) scenario, assuming constant development pressure and resulting in over 27,000 hectares of additional built-up land by 2050.

We apply a Multinomial Logistic Regression–Cellular Automata (MNL-CA) model to simulate future urban development in Wallonia under GAU conditions and evaluate two planning strategies aimed at achieving NNLT: Densification Only (DO) and Centralities (C). The DO scenario restricts all new development to existing urban areas through infill and vertical densification. The Centralities scenario permits both densification and limited expansion within a network of selected urban nodes, chosen for their infrastructure, accessibility, and strategic role.

Both alternatives significantly reduce land take compared to GAU. The DO scenario halts expansion entirely by reallocating growth within existing built environments. However, it leads to spatial saturation in many municipalities by the mid-2030s, raising concerns about infrastructure capacity, service stress, and social equity. The Centralities scenario results in a more balanced spatial distribution and reduces total land take to around 6,100 hectares by 2050. It also preserves rural landscapes and avoids overburdening specific areas.

Beyond aggregate outcomes, we analyse the spatial distribution of benefits and burdens. The DO strategy disproportionately favours municipalities with available capacity, potentially widening disparities in housing and investment. In contrast, the Centralities approach concentrates growth and infrastructure in designated nodes, potentially limiting opportunities in non-selected areas.

Our findings indicate that while both DO and Centralities offer pathways toward reducing land take, each involves trade-offs in feasibility, equity, and governance.Effective implementation requires not only strong spatial modelling but also coordination across planning levels and sectors. This study underscores the value of scenario-based modelling for guiding strategic decisions in urban and regional planning and highlights the need to balance environmental goals with issues of access, fairness, and territorial cohesion.

Functionally derelict areas, or brownfields, have gained increasing attention in Slovenia since 2015 due to their implications for sustainable land use, urban regeneration, and land recycling. Systematic monitoring began in 2017 with the first national database, identifying over 1,000 brownfield sites. Since then, the database has been updated twice (in 2020 and 2023), always with a combination of methods and sources – information from the municipalities, media and field visits, which ensures high quality data. This methodology enables spatial and temporal tracking of brownfield dynamics, and the datasets provide crucial insight into the scale, presence, and transformation of brownfields and are essential in addressing land take, urban sprawl, and biodiversity loss.

This study analyses brownfield development in Slovenia by combining spatial datasets from the three national databases with temporal-spatial analysis in R. The main objectives are: (1) to evaluate the evolution of brownfield monitoring and data management practices since 2015, and (2) to identify and characterize development cycles of brownfields across Slovenia. Recognising such cycles contributes to understanding land-use change processes and developmental practices, as well as supports planning strategies aiming to prioritize redevelopment over the expansion of build-up areas through greenfield investment.

The method involves harmonizing datasets across years to track site-level changes in brownfield status. We apply analysis to identify characteristics on three dominant trajectories: persistent brownfields (unchanged over time), emerging brownfields (newly identified), and redeveloping brownfields (removed from the inventory due to redevelopment). Additional GIS-based visualizations reveal spatial patterns, such as redevelopment clusters in urban centres and increasing brownfield emergence in peri-urban areas. These cycles indicate that brownfield dynamics are not static but respond to economic, policy, and spatial factors.

Such findings highlight the necessity of continuous brownfield detection and monitoring, while open data platforms could enable responsive planning. Recognizing brownfield cycles allows planners to identify optimal intervention windows and tailor policy responses to specific spatial and temporal contexts.