Regional policy in transition - A multi-level governance perspective on the case of Denmark

Abstract

Denmark would appear to be a radical, but overlooked, example of the general Western European trend away from national top-down schemes towards a situation where regional policy is a multi-level activity in which European and regional actors are heavily involved. In order to analyse such transformations the article first proposes a conceptual framework capable of accounting for different forms of regional policy and their interaction, and then applies it to the Danish case. The analysis of inter-organizational relations, strategies and resource dependencies show that in Denmark the new paradigm in regional policy resembles a decentralized form of industrial policy in which regionally-based actors play a major role via their organizational and informational resources, but that central government still pays a major role as a regulator of the activities of other actors within a multi-level institutional setting.