List Of Municipalities Of Norway
Norway is divided into 19 administrative regions, called counties (fylker, singular: fylke), and 430 municipalities (kommuner, singular: kommune – cf. communes). The capital city Oslo is considered both a county and a municipality.
Municipalities are the atomic unit of local government in Norway and are responsible for primary education (until 10th grade), outpatient health services, senior citizen services, unemployment and other social services, zoning, economic development, and municipal roads. Law enforcement and church services are provided at a national level in Norway.
Municipalities are undergoing continuous consolidation. In 1930, there were 747 municipalities in Norway. At this writing there are 430, and there are plans for further mergers and political pressure to do so. See the list of former municipalities of Norway for further detail.
The consolidation effort is complicated by a number of factors. Since block grants are made by the national government to the municipalities based on an assessment of need, there is little incentive for the municipalities to lose local autonomy. The national policy is that municipalities should only merge voluntarily, and studies are underway to identify potential gains.
Read more about List Of Municipalities Of Norway: Municipalities
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list and/or norway:
“Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal-passers—all.”
—Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)