How many regional and local governments are there around the world? It sounds like a simple question. But the answer is surprisingly complicated.
Every country organizes its public sector across a different set of territorial levels. Some countries have a relatively simple structure, with a national government and a single tier of municipalities. Others have multiple governance levels, including states or provinces, districts, municipalities, and village governments. Understanding these arrangements is fundamental to the study of decentralization and multilevel governance.
Yet even the straightforward question—how many regional and local governments exist around the world?—has no single, universally accepted answer. The challenge is not simply to obtain accurate counts. The bigger challenge is to decide which institutions should be counted.
What counts as a subnational government?
A crucial distinction exists between subnational governments and subnational administrations. In order to be considered subnational governments, subnational institutions must generally have a degree of legal, political, administrative, and fiscal autonomy and authority within a defined regional or local territory. As such, they must have their own leadership, their own budgets, legally assigned responsibilities, and authority to make and implement decisions on local or regional matters. Subnational administrations, by contrast, are territorial extensions of higher-level governments. A province or district may have its own administrative offices, staff, and budgetary allocations without constituting an autonomous government. Its leadership may be appointed by the central government, and its activities may be directed primarily through hierarchical administrative arrangements.
In practice, the distinction is not always clear-cut. Some countries combine elected subnational councils with deconcentrated administrative offices. Others enjoy limited autonomy in some areas but remain dependent on higher levels of government for personnel, financing, or policy decisions–thereby robbing them of the ability to respond to the needs of their constituents autonomously. Drawing the line between subnational governments and deconcentrated administrations can therefore be a difficult one. As a result, arriving at a an accurate count of regional and local governments around the world requires more than translating national institutional names into a common terminology and adding up the totals. The process requires a consistent understanding of each institution’s territorial position, functions, and institutional character, and the consistent application of the chosen definitions.
What data is available on subnational governance structures?
There is no single authoritative global dataset on the multilevel governance organization of the public sector. Instead, several datasets offer complementary perspectives, differing in their purpose, coverage, definitions, and classification of regional and local governance institutions. Territorial administrative datasets (such as FAO’s Global Administrative Unit Layers) map the territorial divisions of countries without necessarily distinguishing between subnational governments, dependent administrative units, or territorial statistical units. Other global data sources, such as UN Women’s Women in Local Government dataset, provide detailed classifications of subnational governance institutions but do not necessarily offer comprehensive tabulations of the number of regional and local governments in each country.
Two global datasets focus more explicitly on the institutional structure of multilevel governance: the OECD/UCLG World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment (SNG-WOFI) and the more recent (still preliminary) Global MLG Structure dataset.
OECD/UCLG’s Subnational Government Structure indicators
One of the most important global sources of comparative information is the World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment (SNG-WOFI), developed by the OECD and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). Although the primary purpose of the OECD/UCLG SNG-WOFI dataset is to provide internationally comparable information on subnational government finances, the data set also includes valuable structural data on the number and levels of regional and local governments. WOFI’s tabulation of subnational governments follows the approach used for OECD’s Dashboard on Subnational Government Structure and Finance. For international comparison, OECD organizes subnational governments into three broad categories: municipal, intermediate, and regional or state governments.
SNG-WOFI intends to focus on decentralized subnational governments, rather than deconcentrated territorial administrations. In practice, however, its country-level tabulations appear to include not only devolved regional and local governments but also, in some countries, institutions that are more accurately characterized as deconcentrated administrative units. The dataset does not consistently distinguish between these different institutional arrangements, potentially complicating cross-country comparisons.
Its 2022 edition provides information for 135 countries, covering approximately 93 percent of the world’s population. Based on the institutions included in its database, the OECD/UCLG reports the following totals:
| Level of government | Number |
|---|---|
| Municipal governments | 648,741 |
| Intermediate governments | 12,385 |
| Regional and state governments | 2,513 |
| Total subnational governments | 663,639 |
Source: OECD/UCLG, World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment, 2022 Synthesis Report, Figure 1.1.
The OECD/UCLG dataset provides a valuable, standardized picture of subnational government structures worldwide. Its particular strength is the ability to connect institutional structures with internationally comparable data on subnational expenditure, revenue, investment, and debt. While the dataset provides an important comparative reference, its institutional counts should be interpreted with some caution, particularly when comparing the extent of decentralization across countries.
The Global MLG approach: Mapping the territorial structure of the public sector
The Global MLG Structure dataset, developed through the Global Observatory on Multilevel Governance, takes a complementary approach. Rather than beginning with the question of whether an institution qualifies as a decentralized subnational government, it begins by identifying the territorial and institutional levels through which the public sector is organized around the world. The objective is to establish a consistent, country-by-country picture of multilevel governance arrangements, including both autonomous subnational governments and dependent territorial administrations.
The Global MLG methodology distinguishes among national, regional, and local levels, while recognizing that countries may have more than one local level or additional institutional arrangements. Its classification is intended to reflect the functional position of each level within the national territorial system rather than relying exclusively on the terminology used in national legislation. The dataset also distinguishes the institutional character of different levels. Through its institutional-depth assessment, it considers the extent to which institutions possess political, administrative, and fiscal autonomy.
The Global MLG dataset identifies approximately 850,861 subnational administrative and governance institutions, including both regional and local institutions.
The overwhelming majority of these subnational institutions—822,421 institutions—operate at the local level. Importantly, not all of these are local governments in the conventional sense: some are deconcentrated administrative units or other local governance bodies. Nonetheless, 693,452 are non-deconcentrated local governance institutions, illustrating the extraordinary scale and institutional diversity of local governance worldwide.
The number and territorial scale of subnational institutions vary considerably across regions. Asia accounts for by far the largest number, with 526,680 regional and local administrative and governance institutions, followed by Europe (117,401), Africa (115,568), the Americas (74,092), MENA (15,419), and Oceania (1,701). These differences partly reflect differences in the population size of each global region, but also substantial variations in how countries organize governance below the national level—including the number of regional and local tiers, the territorial scale of institutions, and the extent to which governance reaches down to relatively small communities.
Globally, there is approximately one local administrative or governance institution for every 10,050 people. This global average, however, masks enormous variation in the territorial scale and institutional character of local governance. Some countries organize local governance through thousands of relatively small municipalities, villages, or community-level institutions, while others rely on much larger local jurisdictions or on deconcentrated administrative structures. Understanding the number of institutions is therefore an important starting point—but meaningful comparison also requires knowing what these institutions are, what functions they perform, and how much political, administrative, and fiscal authority they actually exercise.