Finnish Urban Districts – New Actors in Multi-Level Governance

Abstract

In 1994 The Ministry of Interior created a new tier of district level governance between the municipal and regional levels. This involved a re-shaping in the ways in which urban policy programmes across the country were to be governed and controlled. This chapter examines the role of these new district level agencies in the formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy and the impacts that this “re-scaling” of governance has had on the effectiveness of policy programmes. The aspect of effectiveness needs to be related to a wider context, including the search for policy models which can provide both, increased competitiveness in particular for all regions outside the main urbanized areas in southern Finland such as Lapland and following a cohesion agenda which establishes standards of living equal to all parts of a country at the northern periphery of Europe.