Internationalisation of regional development policies – Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. All eight Nordic countries and self-governing areas have recently discussed or are currently discussing their administrative structures, i.e. how many municipalities or regions there should be and what responsibilities they should have. Denmark has already implemented a reform, Finland has begun to do so and, Greenland will soon follow. The experience has however been rather less successful in Norway and Sweden where many years of study and discussion now seem to have been more or less wasted.This report describes the processes and the discourse of administrative reform with a particular focus on the arguments used and the values that lie behind these arguments. The discourses are mainly concerned with four types of arguments relating to democracy, efficiency, regional development and the reform process itself. The arguments used, it is argued here, are mainly prophesies about the future. This forward-looking political logic is rather different from the work undertaken by research-based inquiries where future direction is sought in past experiences. The current report is part of Nordregio's research programme, Internationalisation of regional development policies – needs and demands in the Nordic countries. The analysis of events and developments has been updated to June 2008.

The challenges of regional collaboration in a globalized world. Internationalisation of regional development policies – Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. Regions are now moving beyond "the new regionalism" into network regionalism. The new regionalism began emerging in the late 1980s stimulated by the accellerating pace of European integration, the spread of the endogenous paradigm of development and was spearheaded by strong identity regions such as Catalonia, Scotland or Flanders. Network regionalism is also developmental and internationalist in its orientation but it is collaborative rather than competitive in its modus operandi and relies to a large extent on network modes of governance for eveloping and implementing its policies. The thesis guiding the project that is reported here is that the challenges of regional governance today are closely related to the capacity of regions to organize and run network activities. The project focuses in particular on Nordic and European networking activities of regions. The project builds on and updates a data base established 1997/98 covering all Nordic regions and larger cities. Thus, a central aim of the project is to chart the changes in networking activities and related development initiatives that have taken place over the last ten years.

Relevance for the Nordic Regions

Internationalisation of regional development policies - Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. The research programme Internationalisation of Regional Development Policies—Needs and Demands in the Nordic Countries was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) in the spring of 2005. The aim of the programme was to undertake research on key issues, where it was identified that new knowledge was needed and where such knowledge could benefi t the development and implementation of regional development policies in the Nordic countries. Three prioritised themes for the research programme have been identifi ed namely, "regional governance", "innovation and regional growth", and "demography and labour migration". In addition, two crosscutting topics were defi ned: "enlargement of the EU and the challenges for Nordic regional development policies" and the broad topic of "three dimensions of sustainable regional development" i.e., social, economic and environmental sustainability. In all, 10 projects were funded during the programme period 2005–2009, and the research results were published in 10 separate reports. In this eleventh report of the programme, the three prioritised themes and two cross-cutting topics are revisited. In this report, key findings of the research projects are linked with trends to draw attention to issues of particular relevance for policymakers and practitioners working within the broad field of regional development.

Best practices from Finland.

Since the impacts of climate change are felt most dramatically in Northern latitudes, local policy makers and practitioners in Nordic peripheries should respond quickly to climate change. This report tackles the question pragmatically, by way of loosely related cases that are of vital importance to local communities and livelihoods. The report focuses on the following cases: the management of transitions to sustainable energy systems in West Norden, the planning of an aluminium smelter in Greenland, climate policy in Swedish municipalities, and the implications of climate policy for reindeer management in Lapland. On the basis of the studies, the report summarizes a set of knowledge-based tools to assist policy makers and practitioners in their planning for sustainable adaptation to changes in energy provision and climate conditions. Knowledge-based tools are practical indicators or checklists. They provide critical signals of a significant turn of events in the policy process that the policy maker or practitioner in the field ought to be able to distinguish in her daily work. In the report, the indicators and checklists are presented in a generalizable form that practitioners and policy makers in peripheral regions beyond Norden should also find helpful.

Internationalisation of regional development policies – Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. Different regions have different preconditions for polycentric or monocentric development. Eitherspatial structure can be rational as a consequence of e.g. location and territorial capacity. However the concepts and policy applications have been questioned as to their feasibility in all types of countries and regions. Particularly in the Nordic countries, where many regions are marked by low population density and peripheral location, working towards a polycentric growth strategy may not have the same effects as in the central Europe, for instance. Debates on polycentricity in regional policy and governance have proceeded along different lines in the Nordic countries, but the outcomes are still comparable in several respects. Thus this report omprises four country studies (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) in which we examine whether and how the concept of polycentricity has played a role in the debates on regional evelopment policy and governance reforms in these countries. The analysis provides a review of how polycentricity is interpreted against the contours of regional development policy and the regional/municipal reform processes in each country and in light of the particular settlement patterns of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

Internationalisation of regional development policies – Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. It is commonly argued that European integration has and will continue to present challenges for Nordic regional policy-makers located both inside and outside the Member States of the European Union. More and more Nordic regional actors have concluded that the European Union represents a political and not just a financial resource worthy of greater attention, and many continue to refine how they can get the 'best out of the European Union'. This Report is a detailed 'bottom-up micro-study' of three Nordic regions, and is distinctive in arguing that – by using innovative Regional Action and Fusion approaches – a clearer understanding of the functional activities of regional actors can be gained. The Report, bringing together an international team of researchers, investigates the types and forms of functional activity undertaken by regional actors when handling European Union questions. It also examines the attitudes and future ambitions of regional actors and aims to help them to understand more clearly what they do now, and reflect upon how they might improve in the future. The Fusing Regions? research reveals notable variations in activity among our three regions, combined with evidence in all three cases of a strong desire among regional actors to continue to further harness the benefits of European integration partly as a means to 'bypass' the nation state and to develop closer relations between their respective region and the European Union.

Internationalisation of regional development policies – Needs and demands in the Nordic countries. Regional governance in the Nordic context are in transition – and in tension between central and local politics, between coordinative and sectorial tasks, between conventional and innovative management. The regional policy level is strongly focused, both celebrated as well as highly contested. Thus some special conditions for policy change should be provided: Either that the melting pot of new initiatives and solutions regionally shapes a policy-making particularly innovative and flourishing, or quite contrary, that the all too contradictory situation implies cemented solutions, implementation deficits or futility. This project addresses the changes and differences in Nordic regional governance the last decade. We will investigate policy shifts particularly at the regional level – and search for someprojects and innovations within a sustainable regional development framework. We will focus on the broad sustainability field, both of conceptual and substantial reasons. Sustainable policy-making is a highly innovative policy field when it comes to new conceptualisation, new framing and problem definitions. The question is, however – after more than two decades since the Brundtland report – whether the 'sustainable turn' in regional policies is – still – mostly a rhetorical ploy. At the same time, the tasks and responsibilities at the regional level have a substantial importance for sustainable development, e.g. comprehensive and spatial regional planning environmental policy, transport policy, facilitating measures towards business development and peripheral areas. Still, it has just few years ago been concluded that '...there is a distinct lack of awareness amongst Nordic regional policymakers and researchers of the existence of SRD [sustainable regional development] theory and practice" (Clement &ampHansen 2001). Addressing policy shifts in the sustainability field at the regional level is vital for tracingpotential new directions in regional governance for a sustainable development. At the same time, focusing environmental and planning professionals at the central and regional level, means studying the main "implementors" of the sustainable and regional, i.e. a litmus test of how the policies are implemented. Thus the project should be of high policy relevance. The objectives of the project have been to investigate policy shifts as reflected in the policy orientations among the professionals in particularly sustainable policy fields, in planning, environmental and transport, at regional and central level, in the Scandinavian countries the last decade. Ten years ago, the interaction patterns and policy orientations among the public officials in these agencies were investigated (in addition, the agricultural sector and also Finland) This project has replicated the survey, which has provided a unique possibility fordocumenting policy shifts, with a time-series of diachrone data on important policy change within the environmental and environmentally-relevant fields. The survey was replicated – with some limitations and supplements. We have examined and looked for changes in policy orientations and strategies, and supplemented the earlier questionnaire with requests for the professionals' view on particularly innovative governance practices, developments or regional hotspots in the Scandinavian countries.

Dynamics and Governance Perspectives.