Foreword

The increasing role of regions (i.e. entities immediately below the national level in federal and unitary countries including elected regional governments, co-operation structures at regional level and statistical and planning regions) in investment and service delivery is among the most important multi-level governance reform of the past 50 years. This trend, seen across the OECD and Europe, as well as in Asia, the Americas and to a lesser extent Africa, has taken place in parallel with approaches that increasingly mainstream a territorial approach into policy making at the national and subnational levels

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the regional governance reforms that federal and unitary countries have increasingly adopted over the past 50 years. The report also presents a typology of regional governance models across OECD countries to provide policy makers with a synthesis of the main characteristics of various regional governance arrangements, including the institutional setting, the distribution of responsibilities and funding of regional governance structures. The report also assesses the tools that countries may have at hand to effectively manage the growing complexity of their multi-level governance systems and shared responsibilities.

The information included in this report is mainly drawn from recent OECD multi-level governance reviews, Multi-level Governance Reforms: An Overview of OECD Country Experiences (OECD, 2017[1]), Making Decentralisation Work: A Handbook for Policy Makers (OECD, 2019[2]), the OECD Regional Development Policy Paper, “Asymmetric Decentralisation: Trends, Challenges and Policy Implications” (Allain-Dupré, Chatry and Moisio, 2020[3]), the multi-level governance studies of Portugal, Bulgaria and Wales (OECD, 2020[4]; OECD, 2021[5]; OECD, 2020[6]), the third edition of the World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment and the REGOFI report (Pilot Database on Regional Government Finance and Investment: Key findings) (OECD, 2020[7]). It also draws information from the OECD COVID-19 note “The Territorial Impact of COVID-19: Managing the Crisis across Levels of Government” in May 2021, as well as from the Regional Recovery Platform, released in October of the same year.

This work is part of the OECD Multi-Level Governance Studies series. It was conducted by the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities under the leadership of the Regional Development Policy Committee. A first version was presented as a room document at the OECD Expert Group on Multi-Level Governance for Public Investment meeting on 16 November 2021. A draft report, building on the room document, was presented at the 46th meeting of the Regional Development Policy Committee for discussion and comments. The final report was approved on 13 September 2022 by written procedure under the reference CFE/RDPC(2022)9/REV1.