Holistic in approach, this Handbook’s international range of leading scholars present complementary perspectives, both theoretical and empirically pertinent, to explore recent developments in the field of local and regional governance.


With a fresh outlook on the field, this Handbook builds significantly upon the existing literature to clarify the scope of the discipline, as well as providing tools, information, and research questions to better understand and further explore the field. Chapters provide theoretical and empirical context to current debates on local and regional governance and offer competing analytical lenses for studying the field. Topics explored include the intersecting roles, limits, opportunities, and influence of actors, democracy, place, scale, and networks, with examinations of social cohesion, intermunicipal decentralization, and emerging technologies. Particularly close attention is paid to relationships, as the Handbook introduces to the analysis the ways that actors, tiers of government, institutions and multiple jurisdictions exchange resources, coordinate action and produce decisions with collective impact in local and regional governance.

Interdisciplinary and international in scope, this Handbook will be an invigorating read for students and scholars looking to better understand contemporary policy, politics and subnational governance at local and regional levels. 

Chapter 1: Introduction: local and regional governance - a negotiated arena
Part I: CONTEXT
Chapter 2: Governance and meta governance failure: exploring their spatial dimensions
Chapter 3: Effective local governance
Chapter 4: The right to local self-government
Chapter 5: Trust and local government: a positive relationship?
Chapter 6: Decentralization and autonomy: a picture of big differences
Part II: ACTORS
Chapter 7: Local citizenship
Chapter 8: Ties that bind. Mapping and explaining the network activities of European mayors
Chapter 9: Councilors as local representatives: council, community, centralization and complexity
Chapter 10: Gender and representation in local politics
Part III: DEMOCRACY
Chapter 11: Local elections and voting: grasping vertical integration and horizontal variation
Chapter 12: Tracing developments in regional electoral democracy: the impact of regional authority, regional identity and regional electoral systems on the regional vote
Chapter 13: Limits and challenges of citizen participation
Chapter 14: Online participation
Chapter 15: Revisiting the local integrity system concept and theory
Part IV: PLACE
Chapter 16: Political leadership: when place makes a difference
Chapter 17: Policy making at the local level
Chapter 18: Poverty and social cohesion in metropolitan areas
Chapter 19: A new debate on local governance from the lenses of Earth system science
Chapter 20: Land use management: local institutions and the power to shape
Part V: SCALE
Chapter 21: Comparing local government systems and reforms in Europe: from New Public Management to Digital Era Governance?
Chapter 22: Governance in contemporary metropolises: quo vadis the state?
Chapter 23: Metropolitan governance and policy challenges
Chapter 24: Regional governance and institutional collective action
Chapter 25: Intra-municipal decentralization: going below traditional tiers of government
Part VI: NETWORKS
Chapter 26: Intermunicipal cooperation: an assessment of drivers and effects
Chapter 27: Multilevel governance and democracy: a local governance perspective
Chapter 28: Corporatization at the local level
Chapter 29: Performance management and accountability: the role of intergovernmental information systems
Chapter 30: Emerging technologies and the future of local e-governance
Part VII: THE DISCIPLINE(S)
Chapter 31: Utopian experimentalism to learn about social transformation at a local and regional level
Chapter 32: Teaching local and regional governance
Chapter 33: Geographies of knowledge: centres and peripheries of local government studies in Europe 

NOTE: Include reference and index.