The Regionalisation of Danish Regional Policy: Governance and resource dependencies in transition

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Danish regional policy has changed dramatically. As of January 1991, all central government incentive schemes were terminated, and since then the main components of spatial economic policy have been a host of regional and local initiatives supplemented by EU structural funds. This chapter investigates the implications of the transformation of regional policy from the perspective of political decentralisation by trying to establish to what extent recent changes have increased the capacity of Danish regions to pursue their own agenda with regard to development. It provides a brief outline of the analytical framework, based primarily on contributions from traditions within policy analysis, network theory and the new institutionalism. In Denmark, however, with limited regional disparities and increasing international competition, the political will to target resources to address geographical imbalances at the expense of competitiveness must be in doubt.