The change in regional governance in Sweden is regularly understood in terms of a shift from ’government’ to ’governance’, from a redistributive policy to a policy that aims to encourage regional innovation, competitiveness and growth. This shift also includes the adoption of global policy models, such as ’clusters’.  In the literature on the global spread of policies it has been argued that a market for global policies has developed. This is not least evident through the expansion of global consultancy firms, international policy organisations as well as a cosmopolitan elite of travelling policy technocrats. Theoretically and methodologically this study contributes to scholarly discussions of how new forms of governance can be analysed, and especially how governmentality studies can be utilised and combined with analyses of the messy political practices of specific policies and programs. The study analyses the discursive shift in regional policy in Sweden: contested elements erased, conflicts concealed and the political order produced. By empirically departing from a ’cluster policy network’ lodged within a Swedish region, cluster policy is analysed as an assemblage of global circuits of knowledge, expertise and local relations of power. A broad range of materials for analysis have been generated through interviews, participant observations and documents. The production of policy knowledge is an overarching political rationality of contemporary forms of regional governance, translated into technologies such as benchmarking, regional comparisons, competitions, evaluations and best-practice. Based on the empirical analyses it is argued that the lack of power critique and a hyper-rational representation of knowledge produce an international market for legitimacy. It is further argued that five characteristics of the policy regime (’the regional cluster orchestra’) contributes to the reproduction of the policy regime, and relations of domination. / Baksidestext Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i vad som har beskrivits som en marknad för globala policymodeller. I Sverige har klusterbegreppet, med ursprung i ekonomisk och geografisk teoribildning, fått stort genomslag i regionalpolitiken. I den samtida regionalpolitiken har också produktionen av olika former av policykunskap utvecklats till centrala styrningsteknologier: benchmarking, best practice, utvärderingar, uppföljningar, mätningar och konkurrensutsatta tävlingar om regionala utvecklingsmedel. Genom kunskap och ständigt lärande ska Sveriges regioner frälsas. I avhandlingen studeras den scen där ett regionalt förankrat policynätverk agerar och den kunskap som produceras. Regionalpolitikens rationalitet innebär att det blir centralt för regionerna att agera som enhetliga aktörer och visa upp en lyckad och framgångsrik fasad. Det argumenteras för att bristen på maktanalys, och en hyperrationell syn på kunskap i regionalpolitiken innebär att regionalpolitikens styrningsteknologier producerar en internationell marknad för legitimitet som i sin tur reproducerar ordningen och döljer dominansrelationer.

Our regional borders and its administration play an important role forpublic transport in Sweden. Every region (län) is required by law to havea regional public transport authority that's in charge of planning thepublic transport. To get an understanding of the regional administrationfor public transport we also need to understand regions. Informationabout the regions was gathered by conducting interviews with representsfrom every region. The policy documents for every regions publictransport was also an integral part to understand the plans and visions ofthe region. Based on the interviews it became apparent that regionalrestructuring is an interesting concept and could be beneficial to thepublic transport but the main interest they were concerned by wascooperation. The social relations and the historical development of regional and local administration is also an important part of this study.

The objective of this work is to analyze the phenomenon of regionalism in Southeast Asia with the emphasize on ASEAN and its impact on member states. The first part of the theses is theoretical and explains the development and characteristics of regionalism. The second part of the theses is practical and analyses impact of ASEAN in economical area, trade area and also area of diplomatic relations.

For many decades, regionalism was considered a potential solution to the different crises faced by the African continent. So-called old regionalism, as implemented between the 1960s and late 1980s, yielded limited success in addressing the multidimensional challenges on the continent, resulting in a re-evaluation of Africa’s approach to continental cooperation and integration, with a view to continental development. With new trends emerging in international relations following the end of the Cold War, new regionalism was introduced as an innovative way to deal with relations between regional partners. With the launch of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Africa officially declared its endorsement of new regionalism. This study assesses the potential of NEPAD to deal with the numerous developmental challenges facing Africa. It explores how new regionalism could contribute to the resolution of a range of crises and challenges on the continent. The study focuses on Africa’s past regionalist experience, the role of new regionalism in addressing Africa’s trade and investment dilemma, as well as its role in promoting good governance and peace in Africa. The study concludes that notwithstanding the positive contribution of new regionalism, especially through its multidimensional approach, NEPAD will face tremendous challenges, mostly due to the failure of new regionalism in acknowledging the influence of other operational contexts – international and domestic – on the success of regionalist ventures. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Political Sciences / unrestricted

Micro-regions have gained an increasing awareness of their potential in global politics, an illogical development that have yet to be explained. In this study, we hypothesize that there is a trend where regions attempt to lobby EU-policy, and explore the role of regions, and their channels to Brussels: how they look today, and how they have changed over time. In this exploration, we conducted a comparative case study where the Swedish regions’ channels to Brussels were compared over time by a theoretical framework built on new regionalism ideas. To collect data, we interviewed representation office officials, and supported this data with a content analysis. We then compared our results to a similar study from 2007.We found that the representation offices today lobby as a daily activity, and that monitoring is often emphasized to be pro-active in policy influencing. Money is still experienced as the prime logic for regional representation in Brussels, but possibilities for financial gain may incentive regional interest to contribute to the EU policy framework. The representation offices favor the European Commission as a channel, but this depends on where in the process the office enters, while informal networks are given an increased value for several reasons.

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In this thesis, changing regional development policies and effects of these in Turkey is discussed. Regional inequalities have been one of the important concerns of the Republic of Turkey. However, the restructuring of state and capitalism during 1980&amp / #8217 / s led to a change in regional policies and Turkish regional polices have surely begun to be affected from new policies. Yet, these new policies do not seem to offer much about promoting development in underdeveloped regions. This study aims to analyze the effects of new regional policies with their successes and failures in order to find out whether they can offer a suitable policy framework for promoting development in underdeveloped regions of Turkey. With this aim, changing policies in Southern Eastern Anatolia Project (GAP) will be discussed. Transformation of GAP, from a project of irrigation and energy based on previous allocative regional policies to a sustainable human development project will be examined. According to findings of the study, some remarks will be made about policy framework that should be taken as a basis in GAP.

The European Union is now facing with the enormous enlargement processes, which comprise thirteen new countries. Different from the European Union member states, these candidate countries are suffering significant socio-economic problems and have to face with the need for adjustment of their regional policies, administrations and institutions. In this process, the EU is intervening actively into the development of the Central and Eastern European Countries&rsquo / regional policies and institutional structures. While twelve of these countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia) will be definitely the member states until the year of 2007, Turkey is not currently negotiating her membership and is highly backward status in comparison with the other candidate countries. In this context, the thesis study is composed of four main parts: 1. the changing system of the European Union regional policy, 2. the realized applications of the candidate countries in the field of regional policy after the year 1989, 3. the developments of the candidate countries&rsquo / institutional structures on regional policy, and 4. the position of Turkish regional policy and institutional structure. Basically, the thesis investigates how the European Union is following a similar system for the candidate countries in the field of regional policy and institutional structure and tries to provide significant outputs in Turkish case.

Global economic integration and urbanisation are two of the main processes which characterise contemporary globalisation. Urbanisation is so pervasive that urban landscapes now stretch far beyond the traditional city limits such that the city may no longer be the most appropriate unit to reflect how contemporary urban life is organised. Today, city-regions even mega city-regions are considered by some to be the primary spatial scale at which competing political and economic agendas are convened. Moreover, proponents of the new regionalism believe that decentralisation of state power is producing new forms of political economic regulation at supranational and subnational levels which are more appropriate for effective governance. However, it is argued that the geoeconomic logic for city-regionalism is focused too narrowly on the functional economic side of regional development, thereby overlooking how city-regions represent geopolitical constructions both of, and inside, the state. This thesis therefore aims to explore the constitutive role of politics in the construction of mega city-regions. The starting point is to complement North Atlantic accounts of city-regionalism by focusing on the geopolitics of city-regionalism in China. Using the Yangtze River Delta mega city-region as its case study, this thesis stresses that theories of new city-regionalism must increasingly be derived from, rather than applied to, the Chinese case. It is revealed how the unprecedented rate of city expansion, scale of urbanisation, and context of a highly centralised, one-party state, produces a distinctly Chinese city-regionalism that requires a combination of new conceptualisation, alongside refinement and modification of existing theories on mega city-regions.

In this thesis, the effects that state sector relocations have on regional development in Sweden are investigated. In January 2017, a government report was released, suggesting the relocation of 10 000 state sector jobs from the capital of Stockholm to other parts of Sweden in order to enhance the preconditions for regional development in the destination localities. This thesis aims to investigate which effects that state sector relocations and state sector jobs have on regional development. Three determinants were used to find these effects: the share of state sector employees, the state sector employee growth rate and a dummy variable which denoted four separate occasions of larger relocations. Three of those relocations were executed as a compensation for military base closures. With a fixed effect panel data analysis, it was possible to investigate the effects of these three determinants and a number of control variables on two regional development variables: average income growth and net migration rate. The data used consists of panel data for the years 2006-2015 on a municipality level, with 264 included municipalities, in Sweden and derived from Statistics Sweden. The results showed that the state sector employee growth rate-variable had a positive effect on average income growth. However, the state sector relocation dummy had a negative effect on average income growth. These contradictory results, might be due to the military base closures which occurred a couple of years before the relocations, blurring the positive effects from the relocations. The state sector job-variables had no significant effect on net migration rate, and no obvious long-term effects were found as the share of state sector employees did not show any significant effects on average income growth.