Introduction

Reforming the territorial structure of local governments is a recurring item on governmental agendas in Europe and beyond (Gunlicks, 1981; Kjellberg and Dente, 1988; Meligrana, 2004). Many governments have seen merging of local governments into fewer and larger units as a way of boosting efficiency, saving costs, improving the quality of public service provision and achieving overall modernization (Baldersheim and Rose, 2010: 244; Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2014). In Scandinavia and North-Western Europe, broad-scale reforms in the 1960s and 1970s have been explained as ‘institutional afterthoughts’ of public sector expansion following the development of highly decentralized welfare states (Ashford, 1982; Kjellberg, 1985;). More recent reforms have been seen as a response to new demands posed by Europeanization, for instance in Greece (Hlepas, 2010). Some countries in Central-Eastern Europe saw structural reform as a necessary counter-reaction to increasing fragmentation of local government systems in the years after the fall of the iron curtain (Swianiewicz, 2010; de Vries and Sobis, 2014), or as in Macedonia, to consolidate democratic rule (Kreci and Ymeri, 2010). In a comparative perspective, however, comprehensive reforms are few and far between. Many national and federal governments in Europe are constitutionally barred from implementing imposed reforms (Gendźwiłł et al, forthcoming) and have to rely on a mixture of persuasion and economic incentives if they want local governments to merge. Because merger reforms are often contentious, governmental reform initiatives have in some cases been rendered ineffective or downright torpedoed by political and institutional resistance. Finland's torturous recent reform history is a telling example. While a government-initiated reform in 2005–2011 reduced the number of units by only about a quarter, a new reform attempt by the Katainen government in 2011–2014 proved almost wholly ineffective (Sandberg, 2014).

The high diversity of reform outcomes and the varying political and constitutional preconditions for reform implementation inspires interest in governmental reform strategies, and more specifically in the toolbox of reform instruments that any given government has at its disposal. A growing literature on ‘the tools of government’ (Salamon, 2002; Hood and Margetts, 2007) facilitates classification of policy instruments, and provides theoretical approaches for understanding why some tools are chosen over others, under given circumstances.