This article examines how regional and local governance arrangements shape the implementation of transformative innovation policy. While national and supra-national jurisdictions lead in designing policies, success depends on the quality of governance at the regional scale. It argues that collaborative governance arrangements, underpinned by civic capital, are critical for reconciling supra-national and national policy directions with bottom-up, place-based processes. Using a comparative analysis of Biden-era place-based policy in the United States and Smart Specialisation Strategies in the European Union, it shows that governance is constitutive of policy effectiveness, with implications for balancing innovation, competitiveness and equity.
David A. Wolfe (Wed,) studied this question.