Change Management in the Context of Decision-Making Behaviour of Local Politicians Regarding Inter-Municipal Cooperation

Change processes always go through various stages. Regarding political change projects, there are specific continuative aspects that influence the decision-making behaviour of local politicians. This also applies to specific decisions relating to issues of inter-municipal cooperation. The intended gain in knowledge is to determine how council rep-resentatives decide towards inter-municipal destination management organizations as a form of inter-municipal cooperation, to what extent experiences already exist in this field, how open they are towards them, and which possible influencing factors have an impact on this decision behaviour. Action research is the chosen research strategy for the study, including a mixed method. The research is categorized as an explanatory, cross-sectional. Semi-structured focus group interviews (Step 1) are followed by constructing the initial research model. Then written survey of council representatives (Step 2) was conducted. This study finds that the openness of local politicians on inter-municipal cooperation, using the example of destination management organisations, is significantly dependent on location issues, legal form, information (weighing up the advantages and disad-vantages) and its origin (internal/external to the parliamentary group). Building on the findings and reference to theoretical framework models, a six-phase change management model was constructed specifically for the decision-making behav-our of local politicians regarding inter-municipal projects, which includes the phases of initiation (1), persuasion (2), political decision-making (3), implementation (4), evaluation (5), and resolution amendment (6).