Provinces of Tavaris
Tavaris is divided into 14 provinces (Tavari: tanerísi, singular tanerís, literally “under-state”) for purposes of internal administration. Each province has an elected legislature called a Legislative Council and government led by a First Councilor, though generally speaking, Tavaris has a highly unitary system in which most power is reserved for the national government and the provincial governments are relatively weak. The Tavari government has redrawn its provincial borders several times in history since first instituting them in 1797, each time legally dissolving the previous provinces and replacing them with new creations, though often with the same or similar names and borders as previous provinces. The most recent map was drawn by the Province Reorganization Act of 2022, passed in the wake of Acronian secession, which replaced an unpopular map dating to 1961.
Powers and Responsibilities
The provinces of Tavaris have a legally delineated set of responsibilities delegated to them by the National Diet and cannot act outside those boundaries. The most immediate role provincial governments play is in operating the system of publicly-funded, free primary and secondary schools that has been in place in Tavaris since the 19th century. (Universities are handled by the national government.) Since 1961, cities and chartered townships (types of local government that have broad degrees of legal independence from their provincial government) have been able to establish their own independent school boards, but these are subject to a limited veto from the provincial Ministries of Education. The 2022 reforms further restricted the number of circumstances in which a provincial government can override a local school board, but also granted to the provinces the power to establish post-secondary vocational schools.
Provinces are also involved in the provision of public services. Each maintains a system of public hospitals (operating alongside a private healthcare system) and a public library network. These public hospitals, which were first instituted during the Great War, have gradually reduced in number over time and become associated with reduced quality of care as political attitudes have shifted toward private sector provision of social services. Emergency response is often coordinated by province-level agencies such as fire safety agencies, quake response teams, and public or government-supported ambulance services. Between 1961 and their 2003 privatization, electric power utilities in Tavaris were agencies of provincial governments, but since privatization, all supervision of power production and distribution was reverted to the national government.
Other provincial government responsibilities also highly visible in the day-to-day lives of Tavari people include motor vehicle licensing and registration and permitting and licensing for various kinds of businesses and institutions. Administrative agencies at the level of provinces often play significant roles in the Tavari regulatory regime and are usually the first point of contact that the private sector has with government authorities for most of their typical operations. Permits to operate businesses, permits for construction or renovation, or professional credentials like licenses to practice medicine or law are all issued by province-level authorities. Each province has a public health authority, a workplace safety/labor regulation authority, a medical and professional ethics board, and registries for corporations, watercraft, aircraft, and the like. In order to drive on public roads and highways in Tavaris, motor vehicles are required to have a vignette issued by a provincial motor vehicle authority; paying the fee for this (usually annually) is a common source of grievance in Tavari popular culture.
While Tavari provinces have roles to play in regulation, they have much less ability to actually set or change the regulations they enforce. While provinces handle licensing drivers and vehicles, the national government is the one that builds and maintains the roads. Provinces operate the public schools, but the National Diet sets the curriculum. Legislative Councils, despite their name, actually have quite limited capacity to pass binding law. Though there are some specifically legislated exceptions relating to public health or public safety, provinces cannot generally issue bans of activities or goods that are otherwise legal under national law or set stricter regulatory standards than the national government. One exception to this is cannabis; it was legalized nationally by referendum in 2021, but in response to the highly divisive and incredibly close vote, 2022 reforms gave provinces the power to decide whether or not to legalize cannabis and gave them broad latitude in how to establish their sales, distribution, and safety inspection regimes for the industry. Cannabis is legal in Tavaris unless provinces choose to ban it, though as of 2023 none have done so.
The national government is generally free to grant and withdraw authority to the provinces as it sees fit; the provision of death services was from after the Great War until 2022 regulated by provincial governments who were free to determine the number and location of cemeteries, funeral homes and crematoriums, but this authority was transferred back to the national government in the wake of increased inter-sectarian tensions in the Division Crisis associated with Acronian independence.
Tax collection, the justice system, and public property administration are all also outside provincial authority. While provinces do set an income tax, which is used among other sources to fund their operations, the tax is paid to and collected by the national government, which only remits back to the provinces a set percentage while keeping the remainder. While the provincial boundaries are also used by many Tavari courts, the maintenance and operation of courts is entirely outside the purview of provincial Legislative Councils. Tavari law does not grant the status of legal personhood to the provinces and in fact explicitly withholds it from them; as such they cannot sue or be sued and they cannot own land or property. All public property in Tavaris is legally owned by the monarch and held on their behalf by the national government. Land that is called “province-owned” is, in actuality, held by the Ministry of Internal Affairs “in trust” for the relevant province’s Legislative Council. Unlike the provincial governments as a whole, the Legislative Councils do have a narrow and limited legal personhood; it is the Legislative Councils that technically employ all provincial government employees, and they have some ability to file suit in courts of law.
Structure and Elections
Governmental Structure
The structure of each provincial government is established in a document called a Basic Law (or, exclusively in the case of Nuvrenon Province, a Charter), whose initial text is outlined in the Province Reorganization Act but which can be amended by two-thirds vote of the Legislative Council or a referendum of the voters of the province. In the 2022 reforms, the Basic Laws were drafted with input from the voters of each province, resulting in some differences between the provinces in things like number of seats in the legislature and the manner of elections, but fundamentally the provinces are all organized the same way. Each consists of a unicameral Legislative Council elected from geographic (not clan-based) constituencies by the voters of the province. The Legislative Council elects one of its own to be First Councilor, and the First Councilor appoints and leads the executive branch of government, the Cabinet. The First Councilor must have the confidence of the Legislative Council to remain in office, and a loss of confidence results in the dissolution of the Council and an election. Legislative Council terms can lawfully last up to five years, a reduction from the previous limit of seven years, which remains the limit on terms of the National Diet.
Provincial cabinets are required to have Ministries of Internal Affairs, Revenue and Treasury, Education, Health, and Public Safety, but may be otherwise structured as provinces see fit. Provinces are required to divide themselves into townships and cities, whose general structure is outlined elsewhere in national law but whose boundaries can be amended, in some cases, by provincial governments. In general, cities and townships that are “chartered,” (that is, that have enacted a governing document for home rule) are outside provincial authority in certain cases and can provide some of their own services. Townships that are not chartered are considered purely administrative creations of the provincial governments, and Legislative Councils can alter their boundaries at will. Provincial governments were granted the power to create new cities in a 1926 reform; prior to this, city status was only conferred by a declaration by the monarch on the advice of the Council of State and provinces could only alter the borders and number of townships.
Provinces tend to have only superficial differences in the structure of their administrative agencies and other organs. For example, the official in charge of public education in Nuvo and Nuvrenon Provinces is called the Chancellor, while in all other provinces they are called the Minister of Public Education. Four of the fourteen provinces, all larger and more urban, have a body within their education ministries chaired by the Minister of Education known as a Board of Education, which makes the significant policy decisions of the ministry, while in the others only the Minister (or Chancellor) has that authority. In the province arrangement of 1961-2022, provinces varied in which administrative agency they housed their structural engineering inspection and building permit issuance functions—some in the firefighting agency as Fire and Building Safety Authorities, and others with public health as Public Health and Emergency Preparedness Authorities. The difference tended to impinge upon the level of intense quake activity in the province. The 2022 reforms erased the ambiguity by referencing only Fire and Building Safety Authorities in the Basic Laws of the new provinces, but these can be amended by the provinces.
Nuvrenon Province has several institutions named as though they are municipal rather than provincial bodies, as it represents what is essentially the former City of Nuvrenon elevated to the status of a province—it has a Charter instead of a Basic Law, a “Fire Department” instead of a “Fire and Building Safety Authority,” and it is currently the only province with its own police department, though reforms to Tavari policing are expected to give other provinces similar bodies. Nuvrenon Province, which stylizes itself as “the City and Province of Nuvrenon” but cannot actually change its name, is the only Tavari province that contains no cities or townships, since it was previously only one city (albeit one exceptionally large in land area). However, the Nuvrenon Legislative Council has been heavily focused on debates over the question of whether cities previously annexed by the City of Nuvrenon (numbering more than three dozen over the centuries) or even neighborhoods of the city proper should be given city status.
Elections
Since 1961, provinces have had some leeway in determining how their Legislative Councils are elected, including in how many seats they have. From 1961 to 2022, provinces were permitted to use one of two electoral systems: ranked choice voting, or first-past-the-post voting, both using single-member constituencies. However, only one province, Motai, ever used first-past-the-post, and the 2022 reforms eliminated that option entirely. Since 2022, multi-member districts and proportional voting systems are now allowed, though the legal default unless the Legislative Councils vote to change it remains single-member constituencies with ranked choice voting.
The Legislative Councils range in size between 72 seats (both Ranat and Lansai) and 180 seats (Nuvrenon); the law requires that the Councils have at least 1 seat for every 30,000 people, but no more than 1 seat for every 20,000. Motai Province, with 115 seats for its 2.3 million people, has the largest legally permissible legislature, while Rodoka Province, with 144 seats for 3.8 million people, has the fewest councilors per capita. Each provincial government maintains its own list of political parties registered for Legislative Council elections, meaning it is possible for political parties to exist only in individual provinces and not nationally. However, in the modern day, nearly all political parties are entirely national and there is only one party that routinely contests elections in only one province: the Democratic Party, once a nationwide minor party that now exists only in Motai Province, where it took advantage of that province’s first-past-the-post voting to establish a two-party system with the Liberals that persisted for a century.
Most Legislative Councils have retained single member districts but some have switched, and several more are investigating possible changes. Dravai Province, whose first elections in 2022 produced a Legislative Council perfectly tied between two coalitions, could not come to an agreement on new district boundaries and so enacted a compromise plan where the province, the country’s third largest, was divided into three large “mega districts” with 48 councilors each, elected proportionally. In Enaro Tavar Province in 2023, voters led and successfully voted through a referendum campaign to switch their Legislative Council from 80 single-member districts to 8 ten-member districts. Nuvo, Odai, and Rodoka Provinces have also discussed proportional representation but have not yet finalized any plans for amendments.
Previous Arrangements
1961-2022
The provincial map from 1961 was a drastic overhaul compared to the two preceding ones, and is generally considered to have been unpopular. It reduced the number of provinces from 16 to 11 (later 12, with the addition of Rodoka in 2020) and shifted the borders of many others. Prime Minister Devri Nacandar Aštoni, leader of the conservative faction of the Democratic National Party, had campaigned in part on a pledge to “reduce the interference of government in our lives” and said that the consolidation of provinces had been his primary goal in the new map. A secondary goal was an attempt to quell rising public discontent over the question of crematoriums in what had become known as the Crematorium Crisis, a nationwide civil rights debate over whether to allow Akronists to cremate their dead. As instituting new provinces erased the existence of the previous ones and allowed the National Diet to impose a new model set of ordinances in each of the provinces, members of the Diet forced every province to permit cremation and hoped that this would settle the question. However, within weeks of the new Legislative Councils taking office, Motai and Ino Provinces immediately reimposed de facto bans on cremation and Zinia imposed a moratorium on new construction. Not until the end of the decade would referendums and other political pressure campaigns force every province to permit the practice of cremation.
The 1961 map eliminated Avat, Dravai, Tovar, Eshtakai and Nakash Provinces, as well as the last remaining unprovinced territory in the Tavari home islands, the Tears of the Moon. While Avat Province had been very sparsely populated and its merger into Enaro Ttatrazhakai Province (renamed Crystal Province in 1970) was uncontroversial, the merger of Tovar Province into Indar Province, and the merger of Eshtakai, Nakash, and parts of Olara Provinces into a new Ino Province were all highly unpopular among residents in those areas. The imposition of the Aequator as a political border was also criticized as unnecessary. However, the most controversial change was the elimination of Dravai Province and its incorporation into Motai Province—the city of Dravai was an Akronist majority city more than twice the size of Motai’s largest city, its capital Višara. Motai Province had by then been for decades the seat of the Tavari nationalist movement and the home of the most violent anti-Akronist discrimination. While Prime Minister Nacandar Aštoni is said to have hoped the forcing of Akronists and nationalist Avatidari together would lead to a deradicalization of the nationalists, instead it served only to foment sectarian tensions that continue to this day in Motai.
1926-1961
The 1926 reforms are commonly cited as being the brainchild of Queen Kanor VII. Though the extent to which this is true is debated, most historians agree that the monarch at least played a role in the elimination of Odai Province, a region for which she is said to have a particular distaste after having to spend most of the Great War in hiding in the province. She is said to have been so traumatized by her time in Odai that she cringed at the sight of it on maps. Another reason for Odai’s elimination has to do with its Legislative Council, which in 1926 was under the control of the ultranationalist Heroes Alliance, which the Democratic National Party-controlled Diet sought to undermine. Officially, delegates in the Diet cited the much higher economic growth in Dravai and Dela as reasons to emphasize their position compared to Odai.
To replace Odai, the 1926 map created a new Dela Province that, unlike all prior incarnations of provinces centered on the city of Dela, was on the western coast, not the eastern coast. This was enormously unpopular in Dela, due to the fraught nature of the east-vs.-west divide in Tavari society that is primarily associated with the religious and cultural differences between Akronists and followers of the Tavat Avati faith. It also created an entirely new province, Zinia Province, that contained no major metropolitan area whatsoever, while the city of Odai itself was incorporated into Dravai Province to its south. Dravai, a wealthy cosmopolitan coastal city with a high population of Akronists, shared little culturally in common with Odai, an inland farming community that is among the poorest of Tavaris’ large cities. Bitterly contentious debates between people from Odai and Dravai in the Dravai Legislative Council is believed to have been part of the impetus for the elimination of Dravai Province in 1961.
Other changes in 1926 included the removal of Ratani Province, the first creation of Elat Province, the movement of Olara Province’s borders southward, and an expansion of Eshtakai Province. The recreation of Ratani Province was a campaign pledge of Shano Tuvria, a resident of the city of Ratani, in his first ever campaign for the Diet in 1994, a pledge which to date remains unfulfilled.
1920-1926
The 1920 map was created in the aftermath of the Great War. During the war, the extant provincial governments technically existed but were “held in abeyance” by the National Diet, which passed an emergency measure in 1909 to reduce the number of seats in every Legislative Council to precisely one each and to withdraw all legislative power delegated to the provinces back to the national government for “the duration of the present conflict.” The one councilor for each province was not elected but appointed by the Prime Minister, and all of them were secured in undisclosed locations outside their provinces for the entire period of the war. Instead, both metropolitan Tavaris and the territories were governed by Military Districts headed by flag officers of the Royal Tavari Armed Forces. The 1920 map erased the Military Districts in metropolitan Tavaris, but the unprovinced territories continued under military government for several years; Elatana did not resume civilian governance until 1933.
The 1920 map contained a new province in the far north, Avat Province, with its capital at the city of Ídalan. This was done for reasons of national security due to the border crossing at Ídalan with what was still at the time Asendavian territory. The Tavari government assumed a hostile stance toward Asendavia including maintaining military patrols on the border until well after Vaklori’s independence, and Avat Province was declared a “national province,” a category under the law that was disallowed a locally elected Legislative Council and instead governed by a committee of the National Diet. It also allowed the national government to surveil communications in the province without a warrant and more easily acquire land in the province, which it routinely did to establish military facilities, including the underground base far in the northern mountains where, in 2011, Tavaris began to conduct nuclear testing. The provisions under the law permitting such “national provinces” were abolished in 1961.
1920 was also the first time a Lansai Province, centered on the eastern city of Lansai, was created; Lansai Province would be eliminated in 1961 and recreated in 2022. The city of Lansai, erected in the 18th century on the ruins of the old city of East Harbor which had been burned to the ground by Banians in the 1680s, was often derisively called a “new city” and a city of opportunists and greed who chose to build upon what was considered by many to be sacred ground that ought not to be disturbed. (The survivors of East Harbor had mostly relocated several dozen kilometers north to Ovavankat Toi, now called Good Harbor, which prior to East Harbor’s burning had been the second largest city in the region.) A rivalry between Good Harbor and Lansai arose out of debates between representatives of the two cities in the Diet in 1920 and continues to this day.