Inter-municipal cooperation and multilevel governance are two central and complementary concepts for understanding the current governance model of the European Union (EU). Take the case of Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, which was marked by a strengthening of public policy instruments aimed at increasing cooperation between municipalities. However, in Portugal, such instruments were operationalized based on institutionalized cooperation networks to correspond to the territorial scope of NUTS III. This model of territorial governance ended up encouraging more regional competition for funding than the functional cooperation that the introduction of such approaches aimed to promote. In this context, the concern with the governance capacity of the new inter-municipal cooperation arrangements is a very recent topic in the literature, and its reconciliation with the problems of multilevel governance is a work to be done. There are studies that analyze incentives and blockages, as well as the types of inter-municipal cooperation arrangements. Macro approaches (historical and sociological institutionalism) are generally used to explain the influence of administrative traditions and constitutional-legal frameworks (associated with path dependecy phenomena) on the different types and successes of the arrangements achieved. At the micro level the framework of the Institutional Collective Action (ACI) has gained a great prominence to explain the motivations / incentives for the decision for the municipal actors to cooperate. But I have not seen research using social network analysis to analyze cooperation networks. Theories of network governance are also little used. Is it possible to talk about cooperation without analyzing networks? Is there a gap here? Why has it persisted? How can it be bypassed?
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