ABSTRACT
Institutional change and organizational learning constitute everyday processes that seek to address the challenges of European territorial development, the results of which are context specific and its implications often contested. This represents the growing diversity within European cities as well as between its regions. It also can set the stage for new and existing territorial governance arrangements. Together these new and existing arrangements constitute a complex layering of institutional and political geographies of agent interaction, which transcend and/or challenge established jurisdictions at varying territorial scales (cross-scalar) and across different institutional remits or responsibilities (‘multi-jurisdictional’). These multi-agent, cross-scalar governance arrangements form systems of multi-level governance with interactions within and between ‘territorial knowledge communities’ (Chapter 2). These processes involve the transfer of formal authority beyond core representative institutions and are the result of both the rescaling of formal authority up to supranational institutions and down to sub-national governments (Hooghe and Marks, 2001). At the same time these processes imply a need to move beyond the ‘hard’ regulatory spaces formed by administrative borders as well as the spaces defined by professional and disciplinary borders. The flexible and dynamic realities of this post-enlargement cross-scalar and multi-jurisdictional policy environment create challenges but also opportunities for existing and emerging multi-level governance arrangements.
