Regional Governance

Regional governance is established as a political reality in many countries and is being increasingly reflected on by political scientists in the scholarly literature. There was a burst of interest in regional governance from scholars such as Gary Marks and colleagues, Liesbet Hooghe, and Michael Keating mostly writing from a European perspective. The reason for this European focus is that many of the states making up the European Union had neither regional governance nor even regional government until relatively late in their evolution. Italy's regions were established in the immediate aftermath of the 1939–1945 war, Spain's post-Franco, and France's in the early 1980s. Hitherto these had been either extremely centralized or largely centralized polities. The first two were formed under fascism and the third under socialism Mitterrand style. It is a justification for regional government that it acts as something of a brake on extreme centralization of power and respects ethnocultural distinctiveness as with the German-speaking minority in Italy's Trento-Alto Adige region or [Page 1448]Spain's historic differences in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country, which have linguistic or dialect distinctiveness in their everyday speech and culture. Less well known but also an argument for regions and their governance is the fact that they may play the role of policy laboratory where new practice can be experimented with and good practice can be diffused.

The region in such contexts is thus the meso-level between national and local government. It may exist as an administrative entity responsible for discharging domestic responsibilities like transport, environment, economic development, and health care through a divisional structure. Or it may be democratic in the sense that such an administrative structure is overlaid by a democratic parliament or assembly. It is, under the latter circumstances, not to be confused with a federal state that has by constitution even distribution of powers to the meso-level. Indeed, in many respects, notably absent local taxation powers, regional governments may have fewer powers than federal systems allow their states, provinces, or Länder as in Austria or Germany. However, although regional government seems to be a prerequisite for regional governance, the reverse seems seldom to be true. This is because of two somewhat contradictory political processes involving regional evolution. The first is referred to as regionalism, where a suppressed regional (also national) culture expresses itself through other status institutions like the church, the federal or unitary university (where it exists), or the institutions of linguistic reproduction (schools, etc.). Many cases of regionalism have been both suppressed and liberated as in Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain. Although milder, the devolution successes of Scotland and Wales in Britain were fundamentally regionalist or, as many would say, “nationalist.” Hence, regional governance can function in the quest for regional government. It is possible such social movements continue in the governance of civil society even where government has been successfully established. The second type of regional evolution involves regionalization, where the state devolves power to regions, not because of regionalism but in response to a superior power, as an experiment, or to deflect attention from weaknesses in the center. A good example of superior power is the European Union, which is wedded to recognition of regions as sources of its diversity as well as recipients of its largesse. Either way, regional governments act as lightning rods for regional governance in the sense that civic interest groups represent themselves to and may become co-opted by regional governments to influence, mold, or manage policy.

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