Abstract

The (legal) term “municipalization“ can be defined as the statutory process of transferring formerly state-controlled public tasks into mandatory responsibility of local authorities. Since a majority of German federal states' legislators have realized “municipalization“ as a means of achieving the ubiquitous goal of improving the public administration's efficiency and effectiveness, “municipalization“ is set to be implemented still further in the future. Due to novel issues of constitutional law (e.g. concerning the existence of local autonomy over the execution of the transferred tasks) it is fundamentally important to distinguish between genuine and false “municipalization“. The latter is characterized by the fact that the transferred task does not become a matter of self-government. Furthermore, this article argues that “municipalization“ will cause a (structural) change not only in the state's responsibility for the respective tasks, but also, and particularly so, in the essence of local self-government. Finally, this article focuses on the legal consequences of “municipalization“ and concludes that, in order to preserve the advantages and particularities of local self-government, there is a need to reform the existing system, and that there is a strong impulse originating in German constitutional law to “municipalize“ public tasks as ‘genuinely‘ as possible in the future.