Disputes About Regionalisation and Regional Self-Government in Croatia

Chapter presents and analyses the issues of regionalisation and regional self-government in Croatia. It includes the overview of the historical background and the institutional development of regional self-government institutions, the analysis of their current constitutional and legislative position and functional profile, and summarises the ongoing debates about possible territorial reorganisation and regionalisation. Regional self-government in Croatia is formally embodied in 20 counties, which are constitutionally defined as units of regional self-government, but their borders rarely match the areas of Croatian historical and geographical regions and micro-regions. Considering their limited territorial size and population, as well as their functional profile, counties are better understood as second-tier local government units that also perform a bulk of delegated state administration tasks. Ideas and even elaborated proposals about the establishment of ‘proper’ (larger) regions in Croatia have emerged periodically within the larger debates on an integral territorial reform, these debates being most frequent during the period of economic recession (2009–2015). They have been mostly confined within the academia or on the margins of the political system among the minor opposition and regional parties, having little to no influence on decision-makers. The creation of ‘proper’ self-governmental regions has not been on the official political agenda of any government in last 30 years and regionalisation has even been labelled as a threat to the national unity. Being rather small and ethnically homogeneous, Croatia could instigate a process of regionalisation which could be focused more on technical and efficiency considerations than on identity and/or ethnical issues. This has already been indicated in several cases of territorial reorganisations of national public institutions (several ministries and public companies) that have lately abandoned county pattern of organisation and deployed an upscaled (regional) pattern of its territorial branches. The application of such a pattern to self-governmental territorial institutions requires an effort strong enough to overcome the micro-regional rivalries and antagonisms that the county system has produced or intensified in past three decades.