When it comes to local government, maybe less is more

Just a few hours before polling stations reopen for the local election runoffs, and before we can forget the name of our mayor and regional governor for another five years, allow me to leave you with this small morsel of food for thought: Instead of demanding that local governments have more responsibilities and more decentralized powers, maybe we should be asking for less.

Greece has 13 regional and 332 municipal authorities, and these are administrative mechanisms with relatively few responsibilities. In my opinion, we need fewer regional authorities and perhaps with fewer responsibilities. The nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) system used by the European Union to define regions (which belong in the NUTS 2 category) states that they need to have a population of between 800,000 and 3 million residents. There are certain exceptions to this rule for geographical, cultural and other reasons, but Greece took these exceptions and ran with them, so that only two of its 13 regions actually have more than 800,000 residents.

Cyprus, Estonia and Latvia each constitute a single region (not to mention Malta and Luxembourg). Portugal is split into seven and Sweden, which is four times the size of Greece in area, has eight. Yet Greece has 13, two of which have the population of Patra.

Some will certainly argue that this makes sense because Greece has so many islands and is split by mountains down the middle. Yet neither the number of regions nor their geographical placement seems to be dictated by such concerns. Ikaria, for example, is the southernmost island of the North Aegean Region and is closer to all the islands of the Cyclades Region than it is to Limnos in the north of its own region. Corfu is closer to Epirus than it is to the other Ionian islands.

In short, the way the 13 regions are separated doesn’t make sense – not geographically, economically, functionally or administratively.

Cyprus, Estonia and Latvia each constitute a single region. Portugal is split into seven and Sweden, which is four times the size of Greece in area, has eight. Yet Greece has 13

Why is Macedonia fragmented into three regions? And who the heck came up with the Region of Western Greece? None of it makes sense. There are no administrative benefits whatsoever. The map of Greece’s regions is an arbitrary construct – apparently designed so that the pie of European funds can be cut into as many pieces as possible, even if they are much smaller.

Is there any use in so many self-administered structures? Decentralization is widely believed to be a good thing, so no one really asks such questions. But this is 2023. Distances have become much shorter: Highways have brought one end of the country close to the other, we have 40 airports and we have technology that allows every decision-making center to be in touch with services and staff working in every corner of the country.

Maybe decentralization is not the answer anymore. And some matters – like healthcare, education, natural disaster management and major public works – are certainly best not left in the hands of sundry local administrations that rarely see eye to eye, not even within the same region.

So what am I suggesting? Abolishing regional authorities and stripping mayors of what few responsibilities they have? That the notoriously inept state machine in Athens should be in charge of every landfill and pothole in Greece? Of course not. But we could have fewer administrations and a more rational distribution of responsibilities, even if this means less power at the local level. This is especially so in those ludicrous cases of overlapping responsibilities, like roads, where one authority is responsible for the tarmac, another for the sidewalk and a third for the traffic median.

So how many regions would make sense? Ten? Four? I think seven, equal to the decentralized administrations, is reasonable. And those decentralized administrations would also have to be abolished, of course, even though their geographical distribution makes more sense.

Is this Greece’s biggest problem right now? No. Is it the biggest issue for local governments ahead of Sunday’s elections? Again, no. But in this bleak international climate and the increasingly murky and toxic domestic one (where various officials with the governing party have been making veiled threats that if they are not elected, European funding may not be so forthcoming), perhaps it’s an opportunity to deal with a matter of an institutional nature, to talk about a serious malfunction that is like a stain on the wall that is never cleaned so that everyone eventually just gets used to it and stops seeing it.