This book gives comprehensive coverage of current challenges to the very essence of local self-government. Authors from different European countries give a picture of the current situation and of the future developments laying ahead of us. Europe provides an extremely diverse ground for local government studies: governance models, leaders’ roles, reforms intensity, emphasis on democratic forms of government – all these aspects present a very vivid and dynamic picture. At the same time, local governments in Europe face common challenges, like climate change, increasing populism and democratic deficit.

This volume aims to provide a road map of this diversity and to identify some of the challenges resulting from the communalities. It is a comprehensive volume gathering the most classical research perspectives in the studies of European territorial (mainly local) government and presenting both new research approaches as well as new trends. The main set of topics includes local territorial reforms, local leadership and democracy, and local finances. The authors represent the leading researchers in Europe, who had jointly participated in a few recent research projects crucial for development of the knowledge on European local government, including a strong representation of Eastern European countries (POLLEADER II – Political leaders in European local governments – Heinelt et al, 2018; LAI – Local Autonomy Index – Ladner et al, 2019; LSSR – Local State–Society Relations, Teles et al, 2021, to name just the most recent ones).

The authors refer to a common pool of concepts which result from previous European comparative local government research, like the local government classification of Page and Goldsmith (1987); the typology of local leadership styles by Mouritzen and Svara (2002); or the LAI by Ladner et al (2019) – all these concepts build up conceptual frames for the themes analysed in this volume.

Local government studies have, in recent years, been perceived as a magnifying lens for the most important political, social and economic changes of global and national relevance. In this volume, we focus on three fundamental aspects of decentralized governance:

• • Territorial reforms, that is, the institutional framework for local government functioning, reached through either amalgamations or consolidation strategies – this part contributes to the classical debate on the optimal size of municipalities, presenting the newest research on this topic.