Municipal Divorces ꟷ The Under-Researched Topic of Territorial Reforms

Territorial-administrative organization belongs to the most important and highly debated topics of political geography. The paper focuses on boundary changes on a municipal level. Territorial amalgamation reforms have attracted a lot of attention of scholars from different disciplines, recently resulting also in meta-analyses of studies of impacts of those reforms. But the opposite process – of territorial fragmentation (splits or “divorces” of municipalities) has not attracted sufficient attention of academic community. And in the practice of Central and Eastern Europe this type of reforms has been at least equally frequent and equally important as territorial consolidation reforms. Immediately after 1989/1990 turn-over we could note massive territorial fragmentation in several countries of former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and some others. But also more recently, within last 20 years there have been several cases of “municipal divorces”. The paper provides inventory and draws general picture of such changes in 8 countries of the region (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia) and discusses factors beyond the divorce initiatives, discourse of the reforms, as well as possible consequences for local democracy and local public service provision.