The book provides a comprehensive analysis of local government in federations. It fills the gap in current legal research and positions local government in federal studies through the lenses of comparative law, adopting a more nuanced approach to local government. The book considers the shortcomings between the black-letter constitution and its operational rules. Whether (and how) the regime of local government is implemented is more relevant than its formal-but-ineffective recognition. The comparative survey discloses the variety local institutions take in different federal contexts. Divided into three parts, the book comprises chapters investigating local government in systems that, to various degrees, have been examined and classified as federal. Scholars throughout the world have examined the federal-local connection in aggregative federations, (the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Austria), devolutionary ones (Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Italy, Spain, the UK, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the Russian Federation), as well as in federations beyond the West, where federalism-as-a-colonial-legacy has undergone a process of reinvention affecting the federal-local connection (South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia; St. Kitts and Nevis; United Arab Emirates; and Pakistan).

Autorentext

Prof. Matteo Nicolini, PhD, is Associate Professor of Public Comparative Law, Department of Law, University of Verona (Italy), where he teaches Comparative Constitutional Traditions and Global Comparative Law. He is also Visiting Lecturer at the Newcastle University Law School (UK), and External Partner of the Centre for the Study of Law in Theory and Practice (LTAP), Liverpool John Moores University (UK). Prof. Alice Valdesalici, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Comparative Federalism of Eurac Research. She was a visiting scholar at the Instituts d'Estudis Autonòmics in Barcelona and at the Deutsche Forschungsinstitut für öffentliche Verwaltung Speyer. She was awarded the 'Ronald Watts Young Researcher Award 2016', by the International Association of Centres for Federal Studies (IACFS), and the 'Award for Federal and Regional studies 2016', by the Austrian Landtagspräsidentenkonferenz and the Institute for Federalism (IFÖ - Innsbruck).