Developing city-regional governance capacity: the case of skill formation in the Gothenburg city-region

Bo Persson, Brita Hermelin and Elin Backström

European Planning Studies, 2025, vol. 33, issue 5, 721-738

Abstract: In recent decades, city-regions have received growing attention as spaces for governance and policymaking. As an expression of the rescaling of the state, city-regional governance structures are often discussed as bottom-up alternatives to top-down institutional reforms. We have observed that, while studies of governance challenges in city-regions have often focused on broad issues like regional development, branding, or innovation, there is limited research on policy-specific areas more closely linked to the formal mandates of many local governments, particularly in Nordic-type welfare states. We address this limitation of previous research by analysing the conditions for developing policy strategies through city-regional governance, focusing on skills formation, which represents a fundamental resource for regional development. We aim to understand the driving factors for city-regional governance. This involves investigating how incentives, motivations, and the capacity of actors to cooperate evolve over time. Through a case study we investigate how the development of city-region capacity is influenced by different underlying factors. These include the type of actor constellation, institutional conditions, and the civic capital of the region. The study shows how a time perspective can be helpful for identifying feedback effects, which is a fruitful path to further develop an understanding of city-region governance capacity.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2025.2451816

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