ABSTRACT
For several decades firms and organisations in most European regions have been subject to many different attempts to bring their activities closer in line with public political priorities regarding, for example, more and better jobs, increased competitiveness or more knowledge-intensive networking. These policies have been sponsored both from within the region and from the national/European level, and they have been implemented by a wide range of public or semi-public bodies, stretching from government departments via semi-autonomous ‘arm’s-length’ regional development agencies (RDAs) to public–private partnerships. However, from the 1980s onwards, regional development polices in Europe have clearly witnessed extensive change (Bachtler 1997, Halkier 2006: ch. 2, Bachtler and Yuill, 2007), and arguably this amounts to a transformation of regional policy from an industrial towards a knowledge-economy paradigm, sometimes encapsulated in buzzwords such as ‘learning’ or ‘intelligent’ regions (Morgan 1997; Hudson 1999; Kafkalas and Thoidou 2000; Rutten and Boekema 2007).
