Voluntary Municipal Tasks as Tool of the Resilience of the Local Communities

Hoffman, István and Fazekas, János (2019) Voluntary Municipal Tasks as Tool of the Resilience of the Local Communities. In: Sustainable Development and Resilience of Local Communities and Public Sector Organizations. Accent, Cluj-Napoca, pp. 286-297. ISBN 9786065612020

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Abstract

Voluntary municipal tasks could be interpreted as an important element of the resilience of the local communities. These tasks are very flexible: in the European municipal systems these tasks can be provided relatively freely within the scope of the local public affairs. Therefore the municipal task management has an innovative role in the local government system, in other words, one can notice a process where facultative tasks may become obligatory. We also include the role of the central and territorial public administration in our analysis, concerning the financial background and the professional assistance of the voluntary task management as well. As an additional hypothesis, we present that the decreasing number of compulsory tasks highlighted the importance of the non-compulsory tasks; therefore, we also investigate the changes of the last few years. Based on the hypothesis, we did an empirical research in three Hungarian and three Slovenian municipalities, where the nature of the municipal tasks were examined. We focused on the innovative nature of these tasks. When selecting the municipalities, we paid attention to include different municipality models and their characteristics to verify our hypothesis. Our paper will present the main findings of this research: not only the large and rich municipalities and the municipalities with tourism destination roles perform facultative tasks, it is very important in the small communities, as well. These tasks are tools for the resilience to the changes of the regulatory environment and tools for the preserving the local identity.

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