Tension or Potential for No Net Land Take? Configurations of Inter-Municipal Cooperation in Land Management in Germany

Reducing land take requires governance arrangements that enable municipalities to coordinate land-use decisions beyond administrative boundaries. While inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in land management is increasingly discussed as a key instrument for implementing No Net Land Take (NNLT) objectives, little is known about the governance conditions under which such cooperation emerges. This paper investigates how spatial characteristics, actor constellations, and institutional frameworks shape inter-municipal governance capacity in Germany. Drawing on the Institutional Collective Action framework, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is applied to 64 municipal case studies. The results identify two distinct pathways towards inter-municipal governance capacity: a tension-focused configuration associated with densely populated municipalities and a development-focused configuration characterising municipalities outside city regions. Rather than identifying universally important drivers, the findings demonstrate that similar governance capacities emerge through different contextual configurations. The study advances configurational research on IMC and provides insights into the governance conditions under which municipalities may be better equipped to pursue NNLT objectives.