Multi-level Governance—the Eastern Versions: Emerging Patterns of Regional Developmental Governance in the New Member States

This article forms part of a special issue: 'Whatever Happened to the Europe of the Regions? Revisiting the Regional Dimension of European Politics'

Abstract: This article deals with emerging configurations of developmental regionalism and different patterns of multi-level governance in the Central and East European countries, using examples from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. EU conditionality and pre-accession programmes linked to the idea of a Europe of the Regions played a considerable role in the changing—and in the case of some of the aspiring member countries, in the creation—of regional institutional landscapes. While later the same programmes became instigators of (re-)centralization and re-nationalization, the interaction between uniform EU conditionality and diverse domestic conditions resulted in various emerging versions of multi-level governance and different configurations of regionalism.