Sustainable regions: Governance, innovation and scale

This article seeks, first, to respond to some of the more pertinent points raised in the 'new regionalism' debate, like how 'regions' are constituted and how the 'regional scale' relates to other scales in what I call the 'multi-level polity' in the European Union. Second, it explores the potential of regional innovation strategies in the context of less favoured regions and argues that they have an important role to play in regional renewal even though their impact to date has been modest. Finally, it suggests that the most limiting aspect of the 'new regionalism' debate is that virtually all contributions tend to confine themselves to an inordinately narrow metric of development and, wittingly or not, this tends to conflate what is instrumentally significant with what is intrinsically significant, a conflation of means and ends