Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lithuania has been struggling with rapidly increasing centreperiphery polarization. There has been a growth in major cities and a significant decline in peripheral rural territories. The ongoing peripheralization is deepening the gap between centre and periphery. This paper introduces a peripheral region determination model, whilst highlighting that this complex geographical issue combines location, demographic, social, economic, cultural, political and natural factors. By analyzing the case of Lithuania using 1992-2012 data at the LAU-1 region level, the study reveals a polarized picture of the country and highlights the factors influencing peripherality in different regions.

Based on a relational understanding of socio-spatial polarisation as a nested, multidimensional and multi-scalar process, the paper applies a comparative perspective on current trends of socio-spatial development in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Comparing current scholarship and data on demographic and economic processes of centralisation and peripheralisation, we also examine political debates around issues of polarisation in different scholarly national perspectives. Despite variations in national discourses, our comparative perspective conveys strong similarities between the three Baltic countries in terms of socio-economic and demographic concentration in the capital regions to the disadvantage of the rest of the country. The analysis of regional policies further points to tensions between a concern for territorial cohesion on the one hand, and an adherence to the neo-liberal logic of growth and competitiveness against the backdrop of post-socialist transition on the other hand. An overview of case studies in the three countries shows a common reliance on endogenous resources to foster local development, conforming to the neo-liberal logics of regional policy. However, these strategies remain niche models with different levels of success for the respective regions and also among the populations in the region. As a result, we argue for a stronger role of regional policy in the Baltic countries that goes beyond the capital regions by better addressing the negative consequences of uneven development.

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This paper reports on a comprehensive evaluation of socio-spatial inequalities as a means of analysing spatial exclusion in line with demographic, social and economic components expressed using 20 key indicators. The utilised method of grouping into quartiles was able to demonstrate increasingly pronounced polarisation trends in Lithuania, with widening disparities to be noted, both between the major cities of Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda and their regions, and between peripheral areas of the country. The level of spatial exclusion is seen to be highest in Lithuania’s north-eastern and southern regions, which have been identified as problematic. It is to these regions that a majority of the attention in this work has been paid.