Metropolitan governance refers to a two-fold process of consolidating a new political space at the metropolitan scale, which involves intrametro-politan conflicts as well as political transformation through new governing instruments and interest-mediation mechanisms, and consolidating the metropolis as a collective actor in intergovernmental relations, global markets, and international politics. In brief, it entails profound transformations of the role of the city in the political process.

The debate around metropolitan governance is not new. At the turn of the twentieth century, a reform movement in the United States pushed for redefining urban politics, among other ways, by consolidating municipalities to counter a political fragmentation that was seen as fostering inequity, inefficiencies, and failures in the democratic system. In the post–World War II period, public choice theorists proposed ...