Executive summary

To face complex challenges such as globalisation, climate change, or disruptive technologies, policy makers need to rethink the design of regional development policies. More efficient regional development policies require a management architecture that combines different results-oriented instruments which facilitate managing the different trade-offs faced by policy-makers: how to ensure that regional development policy instruments are sufficiently flexible while also ensuring policy stability and accountability? How to strike a balance between performance, compliance and administrative costs? To manage these trades-offs and to develop innovative policy approaches, it is necessary to combine recent developments in economic theory with practical country experiences.