Inter-municipal cooperation is not solely about the cooperation of two or more municipalities. Professional networking or another kind of membership or cooperation could be also positive incentives for strengthening municipal cooperation. Czech Republic belongs to countries where there is not only one national professional association of municipalities with regional structures and this could offer the questions about their influence on inter-municipal cooperation. In this paper we use data from a full sample of Czech municipalities to reveal the role of variables including professional networking activity, regional structures and financial conditions on the existence or development of municipal cooperation. The results of regression analyses provide indistinct explanations. Membership in one national association increases the probability that the municipality will begin or sustain membership in a voluntary association of municipalities (VAM), while membership in another association tends to decrease the probability for engagement in VAM. Since the distribution of municipalities in the territory is not uniform, and individual municipalities have different socio-demographic and territorial characters, we decided to explore the basic characteristics of the municipality such as non-financial and financial indicators. Further, for small municipalities, we were not able to verify the hypothesis that they would be more likely to cooperate due to lack of resources or more adverse financial conditions.

Why do municipalities cooperate and what are the main impacts of such cooperation? Though intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is not a new public administration topic, answers to these basic questions remain unsettled. In an effort to address these questions, this paper scopes a cross-national comparative research agenda on IMC by 1) identifying data sources and methods that can reveal the extent and impacts of IMC in the Czech Republic and the US and 2) characterizing the implementation of IMC in these settings. The results of this preliminary research demonstrate a variety of country and sub country approaches to implementing and collecting data on IMC, suggesting that the development of robust evaluation criteria in two discrete settings-the Czech Republic and the US Mid-Atlantic region-could advance understanding of IMC and its impacts.