Canadian readers will appreciate this book because it shows us that we are not alone. Our perennial obsession with adjusting, sometimes completely redrawing, local-government boundaries has its counterparts near and far. There is a trajectory and a pattern: Senior levels of government generally want to see local governments with larger territories. However, the decision-making and implementation processes, and the results of those processes, have scarcely been examined or compared from an international perspective. Even policy makers often have been in the dark about others' best (or worst) practices. This book is therefore very useful.

Institutions matter. Similar boundary-reform impulses lead to different results or are thwarted depending on pre-existing structures and rules. Greg Lindsey provides an overview of the American experience, where annexations are effected through a patchwork of municipal, state, judicial, and popular initiatives or popular ratification. The latter often holds sway. Wholesale amalgamations are few, and, although annexations remain numerous, the number of people annexed (usually from a county to a city) has declined precipitously since 1970. Contrast this with Ontario and Quebec (Raphael Fischler, John Meligrana, and Jeanne M. Wolfe), where there have been periods of bold, unilateral provincial action, even if the decision makers are sometimes cognizant of local opinion and even if they may try first to cajole municipalities to come up with the details of their re-combinations. Germans, meanwhile, enjoy some constitutional protection of local democracy, but the courts have not taken this to mean that local boundaries are sacrosanct (Hellmut Wollmann). Consequently, mergers in the old Federal Republic were deemed necessary to enhance the capacity of local governments. In the reunified Germany, local governments in the former East were initially preserved as incubators of a new democracy, but a movement has been recently afoot to reduce their number.

In Spain, a strong sense of local identity has largely held back major mergers (Abel Albet i Mas). Israeli fragmentation at the level of the national cabinet and the local manifestation of national partisan divisions have made it politically difficult for the Ministry of the Interior to exercise its considerable formal discretion for local-government reform (Eran Razin). In China, by contrast, centralized authority (and, in many places, a “city governing county” system that has been dubbed “city eating county”), in tandem with almost no experience with genuine local democracy, has resulted in few obstacles to redrawing boundaries (Jianfa Shen). These are tailored to rapidly growing urban areas and the spread of capitalism. South Korea's processes of boundary change have become increasingly transparent (Dong-Ho Shin). Some proposals have received strong popular support, and the government has reverted from separating to combining urban and rural areas. Post-apartheid South Africa (Robert Cameron) has created many local governments from scratch, often superseding smaller predecessor municipalities. This has been done while trying to promote racial and ethnic integration but also allowing in some places a (reduced) role for traditional chiefs, especially in KwaZulu-Natal.

Although managing to convey an impressive body of information in a fairly condensed manner, and still allowing room for three chapters of general commentary, the book does not quite fulfill the billing on the cover. Instead of an “International Study,” we have essentially a collection of national overviews, with large parts of the globe (Latin America, for example) left unmentioned. Furthermore, the causes, contexts, and consequences require fuller analysis.

The editor suggests that rapid urbanization is at the core of the pro-boundary-reform movement. But what about those rural municipalities and distinctive small towns that have been forced to merge? Just ask the residents of Ontario's Prince Edward County or the “City of Kawartha Lakes.” It is conceded that Meligrana mentions the “downloading” factor. In other words, decision makers may want to ensure that local governments are of sufficient size to not collapse under the weight of newly imposed costs that were assumed formerly by the senior government. But is downloading not a somewhat dubious response to urbanization? Senior governments are usually in a better fiscal and managerial position to co-ordinate, to raise revenues, and to redistribute equitably.

Maybe there is a prior impetus. I will take the liberty of calling it the “6-M Factor”—Making Municipalities More Malleable for Modern Markets. Increasingly, these are transnational markets, to which the authors give some, but perhaps insufficient, attention. Granted, in many places there was an earlier, technocratic phase during which local boundaries were being expanded to complement the welfare state and to strengthen the planning function. Granted also, the more recent outcomes differ from place to place. But this again could be a matter of the same light being refracted differently depending on the institutional prism or the remnants of longstanding political cultures.

Thus local-government fragmentation is persisting in the United States in part because of the legal obstacles to wholesale, comprehensive amalgamations and possibly in part because the fragmentation itself is often the product of suburban exclusivism and consumer choice. Fiscal capacity may be limited, but government (state and local) is kept small, often weak, and often especially ripe to the exhortations of business. In Canada, on the other hand, many municipalities were in the first instance conceived from the centre, although there was some grassroots pressure for the centre to relax its hold. With exceptions, not many Canadian municipalities were incorporated specifically to avoid membership in a central city. Somewhat ironically, this less populist historical foundation, according to which a reaction against larger collective responsibility was not much of a factor in municipal incorporations, might have helped to nurture in some places a more collectivist, altruistic local democracy. It is consistent with the trend of transforming citizens into (global) consumers that any such inconvenient, collective, co-operative identities, and even local democracy itself, must be kept in check. After all, the “Citizens for Local Democracy” types do not always take predictable or pro-business decisions! And strong provincial executives, sometimes aided by their appointed commissions, have found themselves with the power to quite easily take away the local political bases of leftists or traditional conservatives. Indeed, as Shen's chapter on China reveals, local democracy may not be a precondition to bustling urban capitalism.

With the notable exception of Ronan Paddison's chapter, which enquires into the philosophical and moral complexities and dilemmas of balancing central and local interests, the authors appear to subscribe to the notion that there are inherently appropriate and inappropriate sizes for local government, even if these vary over time and from country to country. In his chapter on “goals” for restructuring, Andrejs Skaburskis is sympathetic to the view that boundaries drawn in an “earlier century” must be “obsolete” (38). Although conceding that there is “no single optimal solution” (237), Meligrana uses the terms “overbound” and “underbound” to refer to central cities that more than encompass or fail to encompass their suburbs and hinterlands (15). Let it be recalled, however, that different services have different optimal catchment areas. A police department may require more co-ordination over a larger area than a fire department, because criminals tend to cross political boundaries more easily than fires.

Maybe this is just a flippant retort. Cameron, for his part, insists that the municipal demarcation board in South Africa was able, empirically, to arrive at objective criteria for the appropriate size for each class of municipality. Even precise numbers were laid down. We are told, for example, that the commissioners wanted to ensure that councils would “encompass at least 50 percent of all people who live, work, and shop” in their area (219). But why 50 percent? We are not advised. Any numerical formula would be quite the discovery!

Alas, we need some comprehensive post-annexation/post-amalgamation examinations: Did the reforms allow the municipalities to become more economically competitive, or did they become less dynamic, less flexible, and less efficient under their greater bureaucratic weight? Was equity enhanced, or did new, affluent constituents succeed in shifting the focus of the larger local government to cutting taxes and reducing spending?

Wollmann's chapter on the German experience is generally effective at situating the boundary reforms in the context of the rules and debates concerning powers, responsibilities, and revenue sources of the local governments. Unfortunately, the other chapters are weaker in this respect. True, the authors give us some sense of what their local governments are expected to do, but there is not much indication of how easily or how often they are overruled by the senior levels of government, the provisions for equalization, the local revenue-raising capacity, the existence or not of local special-purpose bodies (the authors equate “local government” to “municipal government”), and the like. A small municipality within a large metropolitan area may not be “underbound” at all if the central government delivers or pays for welfare services and education, enforces rigorous growth boundaries (complemented by sensible, strategic transportation decisions) to protect agricultural and natural lands, and even contributes grants to poor municipalities to help them design high-quality recreation programs. Indeed, if there is an optimal arrangement perhaps it is approximated by a relatively strong central government with small, easily accessible, “human-scale” local governments that pay some regard to the local heritage. Tocqueville's and Mill's training grounds for democracy would be available, while checks, balances, and assistance would be in place to ensure equity and to prevent a race to the bottom.

The book benefits from several of the authors' hands-on experiences with local-government reorganization. However, the authors' immersion may occasionally have hampered their ability to assess their national experiences in a broader context. Cameron, for example, is a strong apologist for the demarcation board on which he served. He blames problems on the short time frame and limited resources granted by the central government. And, in what is probably the book's most glaring understatement, Shen acknowledges that China's local governments “are not completely autonomous” (201 and 203).

I hasten, however, to put this critique in perspective. Some of the gaps will be filled by debates and research on another day. By examining a subject that is frequently controversial, even sometimes emotional, these academics from four continents have rendered a valuable service. When a scholarly volume begs a sequel, as does this one, it is a testament to its relevance and ability to inspire serious debate.