Originally presented as ‘The Europe of nations’, it is nowadays easier to qualify the European Union as ‘The Europe of regions’.

For this reason, the OLA-network has the mission to study changes in local government systems across the European Union.

This research programme covers the current 27 European Union member-states and Croatia, one of the candidate-countries.

The OLA-studies have a comparative dimension since these systems are examined amongst and within each other in order to display the concepts of local autonomy and subsidiarity that characterise governance in Europe.

The here adopted comparative approach doesn’t consist in comparing the local government systems to the French one in the view of finding any ‘French exception’ but rather it consists in comparing all these systems to one another in order to demonstrate the particularities of ‘local democracy’.

In addition to the comparative dimension, OLA also stands for an international dimension by significantly taking into consideration the works and discussions of the Committee of the Regions of the European Union, the Council of Europe (Congress of Local Authorities) and ‘United Cities and Local Governments’.

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