The Rise Of Regions

This timely book presents fresh, forward-looking analyses of key regions across the globe. Tracking politico-economic trajectories, the contributors chart the resulting power dynamics likely to shape relationships within each region, offering a crucial guide to patterns of cooperation, conflict, and domination over the coming decades.

This timely book presents fresh, forward-looking analyses of key regions across the globe, organized around power transition theory. Tracking political and economic trajectories broadly, the contributors use cutting-edge data to forecast general trends in regional politics, economics, and diplomacy. Their collective insights into the likely directions of regional dynamics within a changing global order comprise an invaluable guidebook for forward-thinking readers considering where the world is headed in the coming decades and the implications for strategy, politics, and policy.

A critical look at regional development and governance, examining the causes of the South-East domination and comparing each region in terms of its characteristics and its experience of devolution.

During the past 40 years, regions have become increasingly important in Western Europe both as units of government and as sources for political mobilization. This book examines why regional identities are stronger in some regions than in others, and why regional elites attempt to mobilize the public on a regionalist agenda at certain points in time. The author develops a model that explains change across space as well as time and provides a comprehensive discussion of the causes of regionalism. It focuses on endogenous developments in the regions and on change across time in the economic and political landscapes of the regions. Using a quantitative study of 212 Western European regions, which examine whether regionalism is related to cultural, economic and political characteristics of the regions, the book builds a model of the causes of regionalism. The issues are further explored through case studies on Scotland (UK) and Rogaland (Norway). This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political and social sciences, especially those with an interest in regions, regionalism and regional nationalism, Scottish politics, Norwegian politics, territorial identities and territorial politics.

The region is back in town. Galloping urbanization has pushed beyond historical notions of metropolitanism. City-regions have experienced, in Edward Soja’s terms, “an epochal shift in the nature of the city and the urbanization process, marking the beginning of the end of the modern metropolis as we knew it.” Governing Cities Through Regions broadens and deepens our understanding of metropolitan governance through an innovative comparative project that engages with Anglo-American, French, and German literatures on the subject of regional governance. It expands the comparative angle from issues of economic competiveness and social cohesion to topical and relevant fields such as housing and transportation, and it expands comparative work on municipal governance to the regional scale. With contributions from established and emerging international scholars of urban and regional governance, the volume covers conceptual topics and case studies that contrast the experience of a range of Canadian metropolitan regions with a strong selection of European regions. It starts from assumptions of limited conversion among regions across the Atlantic but is keenly aware of the remarkable differences in urban regions’ path dependencies in which the larger processes of globalization and neo-liberalization are situated and materialized.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a steady transfer of power in mainland Europe to new, powerful regional authorities and these, in their turn, started to build up a new form of intra-European co-operation. With the acceleration of European integration, the rise of the multinational firm and new media and transport technologies, the traditional defence-based nation-states are under threat. In this challenging study, Christopher Harvie alters the ways in which we have traditionally surveyed the European past by setting the positive and negative aspects of the present European situation in their historical context. He reappraises the actors of `national' politics, the persistence of types of civic and internationalist discourse and finally looks at the transactions which have created `bourgeois regionalism', and its implications for the future of Europe. Harvie argues that we are only beginning to realise the shift in consciousness, as well as in politics and administration, that an integrated Europe will involve.

How regions and cities adapt to a Network Society and a globalized environment, the policies they pursue and how structures of governance are transformed in the pursuit of those policies are major themes in this volume. These issues are addressed with specific reference to the Nordic regions of Europe. Covering the four Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden plus the Faroe Islands, this volume charts the changes in networking activities and related development initiatives that have taken place over the last ten years. This means analysing regions in their pursuit of new policies, partnerships and styles of representation. Through this process regions are becoming partners and players in European integration and a movement of integrative regionalism is taking shape which is different from inward looking identity regionalism or self-centred competitive regionalism and takes regions beyond lobbying in Brussels.

Regions in Europe explores the state of regional politics in an increasingly integrated Europe. It argues that the predicted rise of increased political power at the regional level has failed to materialise and is fraught with paradox. In doing so this study locates regions in relation to European integration, globalisation, the nation state, local government, and comparative and national perspectives. Using case studies of the main players in Europe including: * Germany * France * UK * Italy * Spain * the Netherlands * Belgium. the contributors show how and why European regions remain remarkably weak in European governance.