The introduction of sub-municipal units in Iceland: the first evidence

In the past three decades new tasks and responsibilities have been decentralised onto the Icelandic local level. The local government system is synchronised as all local authorities are by law supposed to provide their citizens with the same type of services irrespective of size. Currently the municipal size ranges between 40 and 130000 citizens. The heavy emphasis on decentralization has also led to a flood of largely voluntary amalgamations in the past decades. Again, leading to problems for many newly established municipalities as they struggle to provide services to a vast territory with a low population density. Concurrently this has also led to many communities feeling left out and alienated within the new municipality leading to feelings of low levels of democratic legitimacy in many newly established municipalities. To tackle this problem a new type of municipality with sub-municipal units was established for the first time in October 2020. There a large municipality in the rural east of Iceland was amalgamated with three very small municipalities. In each of the original four municipalities a sub-municipal council was established with a mixture of directly and indirectly elected members. They were given responsibilities in the field of local planning as well in issues directly concerning individual communities such as opening hours of recreational facilities. The paper explores the first evidence of the success of the experiment of applying asynchronized measures in a largely synchronised system, based on survey data collected in March 2022. A survey was sent to all members of the local council as well as the four individual community councils. In addition, the survey was sent to key members of the public administration.