Territorial Choice: Rescaling Governance in European States

Abstract

Reformers of public administration are on a perennial quest for a better fit between the scale of problems confronted by governments and the scale of governmental institutions that are responsible for solving those problems. Such a fit, however, can never be a permanent one; societies change and so do the extent and nature of challenges confronting governments. Institutions, moreover, have an inbuilt inertia that often confounds reformers and leads to intractable solutions — or to surprising innovations and variations in the way problems are confronted. Nowhere are these parallel trends more visible than in the field of local and regional governance, where daring experiments often coexist with long-standing deadlocks and antiquated institutional patterns.