ABSTRACT
The Lisbon Metropolitan Area, analyse governance and territorial management, illustrating two critical aspects. The first aspect is the question of its role and its implications for public administration decisions at the central/regional and local levels interns of territorial planning and development. The second aspect is the emergence of municipal and inter-municipal institutions and companies with responsibilities for the management of areas and services within the scope of local administrative competences, with the goal of promoting flexibility, especially contractual and institutional interaction to generate greater profitability in providing these services. The modes of socio-political governance always result from interaction between the public and the private. Interactive socio-political governance involves defining the 'tone' and establishing the political-social conditions for the development of new interactive models that regulate through co-management, co-leadership and co-orientation. In Portugal, a process of administrative decentralisation took place in the early 1980s creating the opportunity for Portuguese municipalities to adopt a private sector approach to public services in the early 1990s.
