Regionalism and institutional competitiveness

Ever since its institutionalization across Europe through regional development agencies, regionalism has increasingly been confronted with localism, manifested through local development agencies, city-regions, business regions etc. The competition between these 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. By defining regionalism as a process of institutionalization that engages actors to create institutional elements, cooperate and coordinate policies on the intermediate level, and by operationalizing this definition into a five-stage institutionalization model, a national regional development system is analysed through historic and contemporary regional policy documents and qualitative interviews with local and regional development actors. This paper shows how local and regional development actors have broken the deadlock of inter-institutional competition between regionalism and localism, and thus have obtained institutional competitiveness outlining a viable path of regionalism.