Industrial development and municipal reorganization: conflict, cooperation, and regional effects

In this paper the nature, outcomes, and regional effects of conflicts over the municipal affiliation of industrial areas and large facilities in urban fringe and rural areas in Israel are examined, based on an analysis of 67 conflicts that took place during the period 1961-93. The potential for conflicts has increased because of the growing dispersal of industry into rural space, the increasing reliance of local government on self-income, and unique Israeli circumstances. These conditions have encouraged two contradictory options for local government, both promoted by neoconservative free-market approaches. The first consists of a growing role for local government in economic development efforts, accompanied by intense competition among local authorites and by the establishment of voluntary modes of municipal cooperation in initiating and managing industrial areas. The second option is to remove nodes of economic development from local government to local industrial councils and to free export processing zones, loosely controlled by the central government. -from Authors