Metropolitan Governance in Germany - Comparing the Regions of Stuttgart and Hannover (eBook / PDF)

The issue of cooperation in metropolitan areas has long been on the agenda of both practitioners and theorists. For instance, Major Peters of Boston claimed in an address as early as 1919 that the lack of regional unity had severe adverse effects on his city in economic, social and political terms (Wallis 1994a: 160-161). On the core of this lies the notion that many problems in urban areas cross political and administrative boundaries, thus requiring regional solutions. Some examples for such problems are environmental pollution, traffic congestion, unemployment, poverty and ghetto-building (Hamilton 1999: 280-310; see also Heinz 2000a: 509-514). In practice, various attempts have been made to solve these problems, reaching from informal cooperations in limited issue areas to strong formal regional institutions with extensive competencies (Wallis 1994a, 1994b).

Among scholars, there is an ongoing debate about metropolitan cooperation which is in large parts concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of powerful regional institutions . This paper explores whether it makes sense at all to speak about the "power" of regional institutions. Even though such authorities have been considerably strengthened in legal terms in some cases, it is questionable whether this translates into increased actual power. After all, some scholars argue that state institutions in general do not have sufficient resources for policy-making in modern societies (Schneider 2000). This paper thus deals with the following question: Do attempts to legally strengthen regional institutions result in an overall increase of their power?

To answer this question, two regional institutions in Germany are examined in a comparative case study, namely the "Verband Region Stuttgart" (VRS) and the "Region Hannover" (RH). The analysis is based on indicators derived from the concept of power by Stokman (1995), who models an actor s power as consisting of its voting power, resources and access to the decision-making center. It is shown that the RH is stronger than the VRS both in terms of legal strength and potential power. Legal strength of regional institutions indeed seems to translate into actual power. A possible explanation for this is found in the differing institutional surroundings of the two regional authorities.
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