This is a list of former municipalities of Norway
Norway is divided into 11 administrative regions, called counties (''fylker'' in Norwegian, singular: ''fylke''), and 356 municipalities (''kommuner/-ar'', singular: ''kommune'' – cf. communes). The capital city Oslo is considered both a cou ...
, i.e. municipalities that no longer exist.
When the local council system was introduced in Norway in 1837-38, the country had 392 municipalities. In 1958 the number had grown to a total of 744 rural municipalities, 64 city municipalities as well as a small number of small seaports with '' ladested'' status. A committee
A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly. A committee is not itself considered to be a form of assembly. Usually, the assembly sends matters into a committee as a way to explore them more ...
led by Nikolai Schei, formed in 1946 to examine the situation, proposed hundreds of mergers to reduce the number of municipalities and improve the quality of local administration. Most of the mergers were carried out, albeit to significant popular protest.
As of January 2006 there are 431 municipalities in Norway, and there are plans for further mergers and political pressure to do so. In 2002
Erna Solberg, Minister of Local Government and Regional Development at the time, expressed a wish to reduce the current tally with 100. The Ministry spent approximately 140 million
NOK on a project to elucidate the possibilities in this field, and referendums were held in several municipalities in conjunction with the municipal elections of 2003.
A small number of municipalities agreed to the plan; for instance the municipality of
Frei merged with
Kristiansund on January 1, 2008.
Others rejected the possibility following the referendums, such as
Hobøl
Hobøl was a municipality in Østfold county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality was the village of Elvestad. Hobøl is situated about southeast of Oslo. The parish of ''Haabøl'' was established as a municipality on 1 J ...
and
Spydeberg or
Hol
Hol is a municipality in Viken county, Norway.
Administrative history
The area of Hol was separated from the municipality Ål in 1877 to become a separate municipality. In 1937 a part of neighboring Uvdal with 220 inhabitants moved to Hol munic ...
and
Ål. The project was abandoned by Solberg's successor
Åslaug Haga in early 2006.
In 2016 and 2017, when
Erna Solberg was the Prime Minister of Norway, she and her government pushed for further municipal consolidations that mostly took place in 2020, reducing the number of municipalities to 356.
Some municipalities ceased to exist only for a limited amount of time, such as
Flakstad and
Hole (which were former municipalities between 1964 and 1976). In cases like these, the mergers of municipalities were reversed and the former municipalities once again became self-governing. On the other hand, a small number of newly created municipalities were abolished in the same way, for instance
Tolga-Os
Tolga-Os is a List of former municipalities of Norway, former municipality in the old Hedmark county, Norway. The municipality existed from 1966 until 1976. It included all of the present-day municipalities of Tolga, Norway, Tolga and Os, Hedmark ...
, which came into being as a result of a 1966 merger which was reversed in 1976.
List by county (pre-2020 division)
Akershus
Aust-Agder
Buskerud
Finnmark
Hedmark
Hordaland
Møre og Romsdal
Nordland
Oppland
Rogaland
Sogn og Fjordane
Telemark
Troms
Trøndelag
Vest-Agder
Vestfold
Østfold
References
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Notes
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Norway, former
Municipalities, former
Municipalities, former
Municipalities, former