QUAESTIONES GEOGRAPHICAE 31(2) • 2012 INTER-COMMUNAL COOPERATION AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF ROMANIA ra D u să G e a T ă Institute of Geography, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania Manuscript received: June 5, 2011 Revised version: May 23, 2012 să G e a T ă r., Inter-communal cooperation and regional development: The case of Romania. Quaestiones Geographi- cae 31(2), Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Poznań 2012, pp. 95–106. 2 tables, 3 figs. DOI 10.2478/v10117-012- 0022-8, ISSN 0137-477X. ABSTRACT . Romania’s local administrative-territorial organisation shows a high degree of fragmentation. The situation tends to worsen as some villages break away from the parent communes and form new administra- tive-territorial structures. Since their area is fairly small and adequate financial resources to sustain some co- herent, long-term development programmes are missing, a solution would be for them to associate freely into inter-communal cooperation structures, which is a basic prerequisite for attracting European structural funds. Such a type of cooperation practice was experienced in this country at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, inter-communal cooperation could be achieved in two ways: by an association of local communities patterned on historical ‘lands’ (after the French model) and by the establishment of a town, of the metropolitan type, to polarise cooperation structures. KEY WORDS : administrative fragmentation, inter-communal cooperation, regional development, Romania Radu Săgeată, Institute of Geography, Romanian Academy, 12 Dimitrie Racoviţă, 023993, Bucharest, Romania; e-mail: [email protected] 1. Introduction Romania), or by having new, flexible structures of inter-communal association based on common With the numerical increase in communes, interests and established by people’s free accord. a local tendency to fragmentation has become In the first case, the political-administrative de- obvious, especially after 20001.This situation calls cision rests with the centre and is sanctioned in for a new territorial planning strategy, either by a referendum; in the second case, the initiative creating an under-departmental type of admin- belongs exclusively to the local communities. istration resembling the French arrondissement From this viewpoint, we consider that extrapolat- (or a small rural district – the plasă of inter-war ing the French pays model to Romania would be a useful and beneficial experiment with a positive 1 Out of the 238 new communes formed between 1990 and 2011, only 5 held this rank before 2000. This evo- impact on the evolution of the Romanian village. lution is the result of the local communes’ desire for We use the term ‘village’ because, with a few ex- self-administration, also encouraged by the govern- ceptions, the new urban nuclei created after 1945 ments that came to power after the elections of 2000. have not become real polarisation cores with ur- Some rural communities situated at the periphery of ban functions. In most cases, whether they enjoy the existing communes perceived themselves margin- alised and decided to separate and form new com- urban status or remain rural settlements lately munal centres. As a matter of fact, many of them had benefiting from European rural development commune-seat status before 1950. 96 RADU SăGEATă programmes, their evolution has been very much experimented with by Romanian administrative the same. practice at the beginning of the 20th century. The administrative-territorial map of Roma- nia, both in the present variant and in the one proposed as an optimisation model, shows great 2. Evolution of inter-communal fragmentation at the local level: 2,926 communes cooperation in Romania and 320 towns, of which 103 are municipia2 (Jan- uary 1, 2011). The fragmentation is expected to The very definition of the commune shows it continue as some villages tend to break away to be an associative structure: an administrative- from the existing communes and develop into territorial unit which comprises the rural popula- new administrative structures. tion united by common interests and traditions, This process can be considered beneficial, fall- and includes one or several villages in terms of ing in line with the action of assigning some vil- economic, socio-cultural and geo-demographic lages communal status which they held before conditions (Erdeli et al. 1999: 83). 1968. Re-establishing all the 1,551 communes The commune, institutionalised after the uni- dismantled in 1968 would reduce the average fication of principalities by the Communal Act of size of local administrative structures (currently April 1, 18643, was to have 100 families or 500 in- 80.27 km2) to 53.64 km2; a comeback to the 1925 habitants. In this way, 2,905 communes came into situation would mean an area of only 33.6 km2. being in the two principalities of Wallachia and Since local structures have the characteristics re- Moldavia. The average area of a commune was quired by identity spaces, delimiting them needs 47.5 km2. Because of high local fragmentation the agreement of the respective local communi- and because communal administrative structures ties and not the establishment of demographic or had a small area and population, the formation of financial thresholds, and even less of administra- sufficiently large budgets to achieve real financial tive boundaries imposed from outside. autonomy was rare. Therefore, the Act of May 1, A small area and the absence of adequate fi- 1904 stipulated that a commune must have 800 nancial resources to sustain some coherent long- inhabitants and a minimum income of 8,000 lei term development programmes would suggest (Nistor 2000). Out of the 2,905 communes, only that the free association within inter-communal 299 met this criterion, the others would associ- cooperation structures could be a solution to ate and form 962 communal rings, each having obtain the European structural funds over the to finance a minimum of health and public order 2007–2013 period. Inter-communal cooperation services. structures represent associative structures of co- The communal rings functioned only four operation among territorial communities at the years, being dissolved by the Act of April 29, 1908, commune level, a type of cooperation already which laid down a basis for a lucrative system of associations of local territorial communities to Table 1. Change in the number of Romanian adminis- perform or keep up some public works of local trative-territorial units (1990–2010). economic, cultural or technical-urban utility. of which The main legal provision regulating the lo- Year Towns Communes municipia cal communities’ associative system at the com- 1990 260 56 2,688 mune level was the Administrative Unification 2010 320 103 2,926 Act (June 14, 1925), which promoted excessive centralism materialised in small administrative 2 In Romania’s legislation, the municipium (pl. municip- 3 Under this law, the communes, defined as adminis- ia) is defined as a city with a large number of inhabit- trative-territorial units with juristic-person status, ants that has a special economic, socio-political and included “all villages, towns and small towns (bor- cultural-scientific importance in the country’s life. oughs)”. It was only after 30 years that a distinction Another normative act later has established precisely would be made between the rural and the urban and clearly the demographic indicators, location ad- commune (Act of July 31, 1894) as the technological vantages, and economic and physical-infrastructure progress of society had widened the gap between ur- facilities for a city to be declared a municipium. ban and rural environments. INTER-COMMUNAL COOPERATION AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF ROMANIA 97 units: whenever possible, each village was to be 3. Inter-communal cooperation in post- turned into a commune. However, this was not communist Romania. Premises and feasible in practice because Wallachian, Molda- evolution vian and some Bessarabian communes had very low incomes. What emerged were 8,751 com- The steep economic decline of the 1990s was munes (the largest number of local administra- amply reflected also by political-administrative tive-territorial units ever recorded in Romania) decisions, which shifted from the ideological to comprising 15,267 villages. And again, the large a predominantly economic perspective. A first number and extremely low financial power made step in this direction had in view the principle of local autonomy simply a desideratum, a mere restitutio in integrum, which characterised most formality. Therefore, this law maintained the political decisions in matters of legislation up system of lucrative associations initiated in 1908 to the mid–1990s, when a number of laws were (but dissolved in 1959) when the Peasant Party, passed regulating the situation of nationalised then in government, with Juliu Maniu as Prime houses, rehabilitating some political personali- Minister, opted for the establishment of large ties active mainly in the inter-war period, and administrative units capable of having true local stipulating an objective presentation of Roma- autonomy. In this way, the number of communes nia’s contemporary history and the communist dropped drastically from 8,751 to 1,500, but that system, in an attempt to correct the arbitrary de- of villages remained unchanged. In order to es- cisions made by the regime abolished in 1989. In tablish a commune, it was necessary to have over line with this rehabilitation policy, it