Annotation

An urban agglomeration unites several autonomous municipalities but has no governing body of its own; therefore, the joint handling of shared tasks relies on the institution of inter-municipal cooperation. The article examines this institution as the organizational and legal contour of agglomeration governance and reveals why horizontal forms of inter-municipal cooperation fail to consolidate into a stable mechanism of agglomeration governance. Comparative institutional analysis and a comparison of organizational and legal forms are applied to four agglomerations (Chelyabinsk, Samara-Togliatti, Rostov, and Krasnodar). The theoretical basis is O. Williamson's transaction-cost theory and the distinction between the natural and the regulative-imperative origins of spatial development. It is shown that in all four cases horizontal cooperation either remains declarative or is shifted to the regional level through the redistribution of powers. The cause of this verticalization is institutional: Part 2 of Article 75 of Federal Law No. 33-FZ prohibits vesting inter-municipal structures with the powers of local self-government bodies, so the hybrid form cannot become a governing body of the agglomeration.