Regionalization as ‘experimental regionalism’: the rescaling of territorial policy‐making in Germany

Abstract

The federal system of intergovernmental relationships in Germany was greatly affected in the 1990s by the increased importance of transnational rationales and by strong orientations to competitiveness in domestic political discourse. New territorial imperatives have given rise to a variety of innovative institutional approaches to policy‐making, the main focus of which is the need to jointly identify new political arenas and new territorial domains for development policies. The result has been a plurality of highly differentiated experimental approaches to regionalization, challenging nested systems of territorial jurisdictions and consolidated policy styles. German initiatives in ‘experimental regionalism’ are addressed in a perspective that highlights their dimension of institutional coevolution in the framework of emerging multi‐level governance practices at a European level: they are hence not only seen as responses to exogenous factors, but also as outcomes of endogenous factors of innovation and change, related to the need for new forms of political regulation in dealing with intergovernmental policy‐making deadlocks and new ‘local’ claims for representation and mobilization. Building on interpretations of regional governance based on a regulationist‐ and state‐theoretical perspective, elaborated in economic and political geography, recent German approaches to ‘experimental regionalism’ are interpreted as new modes of policy‐making that redefine the state's role in political‐economic regulation through a dual process involving a reframing of state‐local relationships and a rescaling of territorial policy arenas. En Allemagne, le système fédéral de relations inter‐gouvernements a énormément changé dans les années 1990 du fait de l'importance croissante de logiques transnationales et de tendances marquées pour la compétitivité dans le discours politique intérieur. De nouveaux impératifs territoriaux ont suscité un éventail d'approches institutionnelles novatrices du pouvoir politique, leur centre d'intérêt étant d'identifier parallèlement de nouvelles arènes politiques et d'autres domaines territoriaux pour les politiques de développement. Il en a résulté de multiples et très distinctes démarches expérimentales à l'égard de la régionalisation, venant défier systèmes imbriqués de prérogatives territoriales et styles de politique publique homogènes. Les initiatives allemandes de ‘régionalisme expérimental‘ sont abordées dans une perspective qui souligne leur co‐évolution institutionnelle au sein de pratiques naissantes de gouvernance à plusieurs niveaux au plan européen: elles sont donc considérées à la fois comme des réponses à des facteurs exogènes et le produit de facteurs endogènes d'innovation et de changement, liés à la nécessité de nouvelles formes de régulation politique pour résoudre les impasses de l'élaboration des politiques intergouvernementales et les nouvelles revendications ‘locales‘ en matière de représentation et mobilisation. Partant d'interprétations de la gouvernance régionale d'un point de...

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