Voluntary Municipal Tasks as Tool of the Resilience of the Local Communities
Absztrakt:
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.