Fragmented municipalities, expensive services, overstretched mayors. The answer is a reform of the community-of-municipalities institute
Czechia has the smallest municipalities in the European Union – more than half have fewer than 500 residents – yet these same municipalities carry statutory responsibility for education, social services, public guardianship, land-use planning, and a long tail of other complex agendas. The study works through why the current setup does not function, why municipal mergers cannot realistically fix it, and what a French-style system of mandatory inter-municipal cooperation could look like in the Czech context.
The diagnosis organises the problems of fragmentation into three categories. Small municipalities often lack the capacity to handle complex or unusual agendas – public guardianship is the sharpest example, where mayors of tiny villages are expected to act as legal, medical, and financial advocates for citizens stripped of legal capacity, typically in their spare time and without relevant training. Many municipal services also spill across boundaries. Kindergartens are the clearest case: from April 2026 every municipality must guarantee a place for every child over three, but nearly half of municipalities do not run a kindergarten at all, relying instead on informal arrangements with neighbours they have no democratic control over. And with several thousand fragmented municipalities the state, the private sector, and the large cities simply lack a counterpart at the microregional level capable of coordinating anything – which shows up in tiny average grant sizes, stalled infrastructure projects, and weak bargaining power against large investors.
The study then surveys three European responses. The Nordic model (Sweden, Denmark) solves fragmentation through aggressive mergers, producing municipalities of tens of thousands of residents. The German model keeps mid-sized municipalities and layers mandatory cooperation on top of them, with constitutional courts in some Länder effectively ruling that very small municipalities fail basic democratic tests. The French model – which the paper argues is the closest fit for Czechia – keeps municipalities small but imposes full-territory mandatory cooperation through Établissements publics de coopération intercommunale (EPCI), each with a statutorily defined minimum set of shared agendas. After sixteen years of operation, the French system has also generated useful institutional knowledge about which agendas should not be delegated upwards: local culture, sport, and management of public space turn out to be the pillars of municipal identity and local trust.
The piece is explicit that merger-based solutions are not a viable path for Czechia. Reaching Swedish-scale municipalities would require cutting the count from roughly 6,250 to around 300 – a 95 % reduction – which is politically inconceivable and would destroy one of the strongest features of the Czech system, namely the unusually high trust citizens have in their mayors (58 % in recent polling, on par with the president). The comparative literature on Denmark is also informative: top-down mergers there measurably reduced political participation and local trust, while Norway’s voluntary bottom-up approach did not produce the same damage.
The constructive proposal builds on the Společenství obcí (SO) institute that came into existence in 2024. SO already exists in law and was explicitly inspired by the French model, but at present it offers few tangible advantages to joining municipalities and has no stable funding. The study’s core argument is that SO can be turned into a systemic answer to fragmentation if three conditions are met: every SO must cover a full microregion (the ORP administrative boundary), it must have clearly defined mandatory agendas (education, land-use planning, waste management, and so on), and it must be financed directly through the RUD tax-allocation system rather than through discretionary grants. The piece closes with five concrete legislative recommendations that can be implemented in the first half of a governmental term and do not require additional budget.
The political timing is unusually favourable. Both the outgoing and incoming governments’ economic strategies include SO development, and the pre-election ČeskoFunguj! cross-party initiative saw ANO, SPOLU, STAN, Pirates, and (with reservations) Motoristé all endorse stronger inter-municipal cooperation – an effective parliamentary supermajority. The OECD, the European Commission, and the Czech NERV have been recommending this direction for years.
This is by some margin the largest project I have led. It ran for close to a year before publication and it effectively defines how PAQ as an organisation now thinks about municipal fragmentation. I did the research, the framing, and most of the writing. I owe a large debt to my co-author Jakub Stuchlík, who kept me organised and focused – I would happily have spent another year on the foreign-literature research if left to my own devices – and who did the decisive work of reshaping earlier drafts into something with a clearer structure and flow. The concise, advocacy-oriented form of the policy recommendations at the end is mostly his. I am genuinely proud of this one.
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