The approximately 2,100 Swiss municipalities are growing, but remain small. They consider themselves efficient, but land use planning, asylum seekers and digitalization represent a challenge for them.
KEYSTONE
Faced with these challenges, many municipalities have merged in recent years, according to monitoring presented Tuesday by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the University of Lausanne. As of January 1, 2024, there were still 2,131 municipalities in Switzerland, or 18% fewer than in 2010.
The trend towards mergers is weakening, according to monitoring. New merger plans are often met with skepticism. Half of the municipalities have fewer than 1,693 inhabitants. In 37% of them, fewer than five people work in the municipal administration. For all the municipalities, the average is 34 people.
Hard to find candidates
Nearly half of the municipalities (49%) say they have difficulty finding candidates for executives. The reasons given are time investment and increasing demands. We are also seeing an aging of executives. The average age is 54 years old, two years more than during the last monitoring in 2017, and only 18% of elected officials are under 45 years old.
Women are under-represented in executives (25%). Most elected women deal with the areas of health, social affairs and training. They clearly remain in the minority in construction and industrial services.
Intermunicipal partnerships
Nearly a third of municipalities say they encounter problems in the areas of land use planning (32%), asylum seekers (31%) and building permits (29%). More and more municipalities are relying on collaboration to respond to these challenges. Nearly half of them have developed intermunicipal partnerships in recent years, particularly in the areas of home care, firefighters and social assistance.
Monitoring of municipalities has been carried out approximately every five years since 1988. For 2023, 83% of municipal secretaries and 50% of elected executive officials participated in the study.
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