The final conference of our LoGov project – Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay – was held on 12 and 13 September 2024 at the Centre for Public Administration Research (KDZ) in Vienna.

LoGov was created as an answer to questions around the changing interplay between rural and urban areas, including (but not limited to) urbanisation, intergovernmental relations, popular participation in decision-making, and local financial arrangements. Through the support of secondments and staff exchanges between partner institutions, collaborative research was greatly strengthened. Indeed, six of our own staff had the opportunity to travel to partner institutions to do research on the various topics, resulting in conference presentations, articles and institutional links. Moreover, the Institute of Federalism is extremely pleased to have been a very active and popular host institutions, having welcomed and hosted eight researchers from partner institutions who came to study the Swiss system of local governance within the broader federal framework.

The final conference marked the end of a long research project with 18 partners from six continents, that started in the beginning of 2019, suffered delays and challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and finally concluded more than five years later. Professor Eva Maria Belser, Co-Director of the IFF and head of the International Research and Consulting Centre, attended the final conference. She was involved as a moderator on a panel concerning the governance of cities and their surroundings.

The IFF would like to give special thanks to the KDZ for organizing the conference, and to our colleagues at Eurac Research in Bolzano/Bozen, for having taken on the arduous task of project lead, especially during the challenging Covid period.