ABSTRACT
The gulf that exists between the Dutch Christian Democrats' proposal to increase the number of provinces in the Netherlands from 12 to 25, and the ideas of Van der Veer (1998), who wrote that this very small, urbanised State may be considered as a genuine metropolitan government in its own right, gives us some idea of the differences of opinion and controversies that have, for at least the past 30 years, surrounded any suggestion of reforming its territorial institutions. The country oscillates between a unique institutional structure which makes no distinction between the various types of local authorities, and a pluralist acknowledgement of the problems and particularities of the country's big urban centres.
