Slovenia has only one tier of sub-national government, i.e. municipalities. Currently, there are 212 municipalities. This means that there are no other tiers of government, like counties, regions etc. Some other forms of regional segmentation exist (voting, police, financial, statistical districts), but not in the form of sub-national government.

Local government prevails

According to the Local Self-Government Act (2007), municipalities perform local matters of public interest in order to meet the needs of their citizens. Specifically, municipalities manage the municipal assets and organise municipal administration, develop conditions for the economic development of the municipality, provide spatial development plans and create conditions for housing, manage and regulate local public utilities and local public services provision, provide social services, and organise local road maintenance, and fire safety etc.

Centralisation on the run

The administrative reforms in the 1990s and 2000s also involved pressures to create an intermediate tier of government, the so-called regions. The reforms began in June 2006, when the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia was amended, in order to enable the transfer of responsibilities from the central government to the second tier of sub-national government, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. The main issue under consideration was that of fulfilling the existing gap between the central government and the very fragmented local level of government, where very small municipalities prevailed.

When Slovenia entered into the economic downturn in 2009, and when this downturn contributed to the mounting fiscal problems of the country, it became evident that the imposed cutback measures pushed for additional centralisation, rather than decentralisation of the country. In essence, since 2010, the debates on the possible introduction of the regions in Slovenia practically do not exist anymore. Similarly, the political process related to this issue has been stopped almost entirely.

New regional developments

Slovenia is a rather small country, which might limit the necessity to create an intermediate level of government. The historical evidence indicates that regions and regional affiliation existed and prevailed until the early 20th century, when the unification of the territory was established. The presented evidence suggests that pressures and initiatives to introduce regions existed recently, but this top-down approach was unsuccessful. The result is that there are no regions in Slovenia yet. However, although mainly political and technical considerations prevented the introduction of regions in the previous decade, it seems that the economic downturn reversed the process during the last few years.

Nevertheless, some kind of bottom-up initiatives started to emerge recently that might in the future lead to the potential introduction of regions in the future, although the final outcome of these initiatives is hard to predict. These initiatives are concentrated mostly on boosting the joint municipal provision of certain administrative services, and measures are placed that involve cost subsidisations for this kind of service provision. Interestingly, this form of cooperation has increased rapidly in recent years, both in volume as well as in the number of municipalities involved.