Samenvatting

More and more municipal tasks are carried out in regional partnerships. Little is known about the way in which councillors interpret their roles when it comes to regional cooperation. Research into councillors from the Dutch municipality of Barneveld shows that regional cooperation is necessary for the municipality, but at the same time it removes important issues, powers and influence from local government. Council members feel that they cannot fulfil their supervisory, framework-setting and representative roles sufficiently at regional level. For pragmatic reasons, they often leave the control to the council, they find frameworks complicated and time consuming due to coordination with other councils and they prefer local visibility for the voters. The resulting democratic deficit is seen as a major limitation of regional cooperation. According to experts, democratic legitimacy can be promoted by strengthening the roles of councillors, such as approaching issues from a regional perspective, collaborating with other municipal councils in the region and applying innovative forms of control, framework setting and representation.