Municipal response to local diversity: Flexibility in community governance

The Scandinavian countries have a long tradition for networked or partnership-based policy making at the local level. The tradition involves co-operation between local authorities and market actors as well as actors representing civil society. Despite this long-standing tradition, the emerging diversity and complexity of the co-operative relationships challenge the established systems and structures in these countries as well as in countries where such traditions are less developed. The municipalities have been used to the role as the authority in these relations, an authority that is now destabilised and which led to a situation that calls for flexibility. This paper discusses whether the municipalities possess the flexibility that is often an implicit expectation when entering co-operative relations with the multitude of organisational structures represented in the diversity of Norwegian community councils.