As of January 1, 2024, there were 2,131 municipalities in Switzerland, or 18% less than in 2010, according to monitoring published Tuesday. And although they are growing, they remain rather small and have difficulty finding candidates to sit on executives.
Faced with the challenges of land use planning, asylum seekers and digitalization, many municipalities have chosen the path of merger in recent years.
However, this trend is weakening, as new projects are often met with skepticism, according to monitoring presented on Tuesday by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the University of Lausanne.
Hard to find candidates
Today, 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.
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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Swiss
