ABSTRACT
Metropolitan areas became focal points for inter-governmental relations within federal states and, as a result of local, sub-national or national initiatives, the metropolitan scale emerged as a contested political space for public policy-making. These inter-governmental relations within states are as relevant for the success of metropolitan governance as local politics. Local jurisdictions usually do not coincide with the changes in the pattern of the urban development. In particular, in federal states, where national governments compete with sub-national governments with regard to urban and regional policies, the institutional design of multilevel governance relationships is crucial for the success of metropolitan governance as multilevel governance seeks to combine the political mobilisation of regional actors with mechanisms for binding collective decision-making. In federal states, strategies for metropolitan regions are often less explicit and more diverse. Federal states such as Germany show innovative and stable patterns with regard to solving the problems of metropolitan areas. This chapter compares the current situation in Germany with the practice in Canada and Brazil and seeks to find out how multilevel governance impacts on the politics of metropolitan governance.
