ABSTRACT
Although few stable arrangements had been established in the US, European regions were increasingly a focus for new approaches to strategic planning and governance in the 1980s. England's dissolution of metropolitan local government in 1986 was the major exception to a European trend which was better matching local governance to the spreading scales of regional economic and social affairs. But even in the two conservative countries of the US and the UK, there was a real awakening to the potential of effective regional planning in the 1990s, when the pressures of urban growth and political tendencies were reinforcing aspects of regional governance.
