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Europe has come to recognize that its regions have a major role to play in achieving its cohesion and competitiveness objectives. EU policies and Structural Fund principles are therefore increasingly geared towards enhancing regional capacities. Regions across Europe are responding, with varying results so far. The Randstad, in the Netherlands, presents itself as a 'far from best' example. Despite continued and serious attempts to strengthen capacities and institutions, the region still lacks effective governance. This paper explores the question why it is next to impossible to establish a framework for effective governance in the Randstad and distils some lessons for other regions in Europe.

Transit-oriented development strategies (TODS) are widely embraced. However, their implementation remains challenging. Institutional barriers play a key role here, and the literature provides an overview of the most important ones and ways of overcoming them. Yet, application of such insights remains elusive, due to the context-specific nature of barriers. As a first and necessary step to cope with the implementation challenge of TODS, this paper proposes an approach to identify barriers within a given context. The approach is applied to a hypothesis-generating case, the Netherlands. The findings indicate a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing formal and informal barriers hampering implementation. The approach could be useful for cities elsewhere that face similar implementation difficulties.

This paper examines approaches to self or custom-build in the Netherlands and the UK to offer comparative insights into self-and custom-built housing contexts and cultures, and specifically, the relationships with local and strategic planning arrangements. The paper reviews arguments for self-build as a means to address housing shortages and examines the evidence of completions in practice. It positions the discussion in light of arguments that self-build can become a mainstream source of housing provision. The paper critically considers the role of think tanks in advocating housing policy solutions. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, the paper examines the work of the National Self-Build Association which has devised and implemented an action plan to promote the growth of self-build housing in the UK. Almere, which is located east of Amsterdam, is one of the case studies explored to inform thinking around self-build in the devolved UK. The conclusions tease out some of the implications for democratic and technocratic arguments around selfdevelopment and the right to design and build one's home.

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The pursuit of transit-oriented development strategies (TODS) is a worldwide phenomenon but knowledge of the process of implementation remains approximate. The ingredients for changing from a non-conducive to a conducive environment for TODS and how that change occurs remain unclear. In cases of successful TODS implementation, it is hypothesised that a deliberate shift occurred in the institutional context through the introduction of incentives to overcome implementation barriers. A conceptual model proposing the relationship between formal and informal barriers in a vicious cycle as well as the lifting of those barriers through a virtuous cycle of mutually reinforcing formal and informal incentives is applied. The processes of change accompanying the identification and the role of incentives are examined in three metropolitan regions: Perth, Portland and Vancouver. The combinations of incentivising measures used are revealed.