Regional Development Agencies: The Next Generation?

Institutionalizing collaborative regional governance in organizationally thin regions—Regional development agencies and the neglect of social innovations

“…Studying regional development from the perspective of collaborative governance means analyzing collective actors (such as organizations or networks of stakeholders) and both their modes of coordination and institutional frameworks. New public-private constellations, such as regional development agencies (RDAs), have emerged numerously and received wide attention in the literature (Webb and Collis, 2000;Thurmann, 2010;Bellini et al, 2012). The RDAs actively shape the future visions for the regions and the means to realize them.…”

Challenges For Regional Governance In Turkey: The Role Of Development Agencies

“…This renders the analysis of their techniques and procedures involving operational qualities, including staff, resources and flexibility essential for evaluating their capacity to promote competitiveness. It is the DAs with qualified and adequate human resources, knowledge assets, and with intra-regional networking skills that are likely to gain the kind of political legitimacy that would allow them to be an engine of development (Bellini et al, 2012b). Given that competitiveness is the mandate of Turkish DAs too, more specific questions in this dimension relate to key positions in the DAs, how they are selected and resources of the DAs (3).…”

“…to development challenges in the regions (Bellini et al, 2012b), the patterns of their coordination with local actors and with other tiers of government need to be investigated. If multi-level governance is operating in inflexible and segmented ways, the extent to which the DAs can fulfill their mandates is highly limited.…”