municipality

The COVID-19 hospital crisis shines attention to municipalities’ governance needs and specifics. An attempt for analysis through approaches from political science, public administration and regional economy and research has been made. On the theoretical level the paper presents, grounds for a territorial governance approach, guided by local and regional interests. The conclusions are mainly theoretical but are also applicable in the field of interaction between strategic documents at the local level. The conducted comparative analysis of strategic documents of two comparable municipalities serves to illustrate the reached theoretical and applied conclusions. The hypothesis whether there is no interaction between the municipal development plans and the mayors’ political programs was tested in two case-studies. The results are used to prove the thesis that the lack of such interaction is a condition for a problem in local government and development and a prerequisite for risks and crises in different sectors at the local level. This assumption is considered through a specific policy sector - healthcare, given the relevance of the topic during the pandemic.