Regionalism as a process of institutionalization: local and regional actor engagement in Danish regional development.

Ever since its institutionalization across Europe through regional development agencies, regionalism has increasingly been confronted with localism, manifested through local development agencies, city-regions or business regions. The competition between the institutional elements of regionalism and localism have, throughout the years, resulted in inadequate regional development systems unable to fully exploit the opportunities and target the challenges generated by
globalization in a region. Understood as a process of institutionalization that engages actors to create institutional elements, cooperate and coordinate policies on the intermediate level, regionalism is operationalized into a five-stage institutionalization model to analyse the institutional competitiveness of a national regional development system. Using a Danish region as a case, the paper further shows how local and regional development actors attained full institutionalization of regionalism thereby providing the region with comparative advantage as regards institutional competitiveness.