ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on deciphering new regionalism within contexts of political, social and economic transformation. Contemporary state-society paradigms have situated the concepts of 'region' and 'regionalism' at the centre of debate over governance and the future contours of urban and regional policy. The concept of multilevel governance reflects complex interrelationships between political and economic forces and breaks down distinctions between formal and informal modes of decision-making. Urban regime theory emerged as an influential perspective in US urban policy studies. The urban regime approach forces one to move beyond traditional research procedures, official statistics, proceedings and official reports. Urban regime theory was formulated under conditions of a sophisticated market economy. But scalar transformations demanded by the European Union appear to take place in isolation of local meanings, understandings and practices that might provide a true basis for regional governance capacity. Competitive regional development policy is an approach that requires horizontally interwoven threads of cross-sectoral thinking.
