Gathering research and academic members from the 27 EU-member states and Croatia, OLA ambitions to compare the institutional, political and administrative frameworks of sub-national government systems.

Also, OLA wants to compare how these systems really work in order to highlight the role of the ‘European citizen’.

The first objective of this far-catching and comparative approach is to create a tool for “reading” (a template to be usable all over Europe).

Its second objective is to elaborate a typology of sub-national government systems.

This research programme is based on three scientific outputs:

- the OLA-website which analytically presents updated documents at different levels, offering overviews and specialised studies, about local government system in each studied country

- a series of annual workshops in order to explore precisely and in-depth, but still comparatively, both general and specific issues of local government

- by 2012 a collective book on local comparative law aiming at demonstrating the convergences and divergences of local government systems.