This is an invitation and call for papers for a small-scale conference on the politics of ‘the region’ in contemporary policy transformations, co-organized by the Critical and Interpretive Public Administration Research (CIPA) colloquium of the Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG), and Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM), Erasmus University Rotterdam.
- Date
- Tuesday 30 Jun 2026, 09:30 - 17:30
- Type
- Conference
- Spoken Language
- English
- Location
University of Utrecht
- Ticket information
The conference will be held at Utrecht University. Registration is required. There is no fee required to participate. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
The politics of the region
Regional areas are increasingly being (re)discovered and addressed by policymakers, politicians and practitioners as places for organizing public services. ‘The region’ has emerged as a guiding concept, scale, mechanism, instrument or framework to address pressing societal issues. This suggest an underlying belief that the region can serve as a policy strategy to break through institutional silos that prevent networked ways of working to address the needs and preferences for local populations. The growing emphasis on the region tends to imply that regions are bounded geographical and administrative entities that are well-defined and usable for policy strategies. This assumption overlooks the ways in which regions are continuously (re)produced, maintained and contested between and across administrative, institutional, organizational, and network levels, and the power dynamics involved in these processes. The region is, therefore, not a pre-given entity, but one that is actively constituted through the interactions of diverse actors.
A critical-interpretive lens
From this perspective, the growing prominence of the region in policy transformations further invites and initiates public and scholarly debates on its provisional, political and multi-layered nature. It raises a range of administrative and institutional questions that benefit from a critical-interpretive lens:
- How are regions made?
- What role do regions play in driving policy changes in different public domains, and what does this mean for the delivery of public services?
- How does the patchwork of regional boundaries work out in practice and how are policies coordinated over regional boundaries?
- How can democratic legitimacy be sustained? And how do regional decision-making processes come about?
- How can the region be made an object of inspection for public services?
- How to account for structural regional differences in terms of network capital?
- How do regional dynamics feed back into traditional policy processes?
Themes
In order to structure discussions about the politics of the region in policy transformations, we distinguish three interrelated sub themes:
- The region as a concept
- The region as a governing practice
- The region as a research field
These themes lead to dedicated plenary blocks and parallel panel sessions during the conference day.
Conference aim
The aim of this small-scale conference is to critically reflect on the region in policy transformations. From a critical-interpretative lens, the conference aims to move beyond taken-for-granted understandings of regions as pre-existing, bounded territories. Through plenary sessions and panel discussions, it seeks to problematize, refine and contribute to current analyses of the region in policy shifts and bring together different generations of researchers, (master’s) students, and policymakers that study or work with the region.
Conference set up
The conference will take place on 30 June 2026, from 9:30 to 17:30 CET. The program includes a plenary session followed by parallel sessions. The plenary session features thought-provoking keynote speakers, after which participants break out into sub-sessions focused on providing feedback on ongoing research work. In this call for papers, we invite researchers, both junior and senior, to participate in and contribute to the conference. We also invite (master) students, policymakers, politicians and practitioners to join the conference and engage in the discussions.
Practicalities
Interested applicants are invited to submit abstracts of approximately 500 words before the deadline of 27 April 2026 at 9:00 CET. The selected applicants are to present their work during one of the panel sessions during the conference. We also offer the possibility to present other contributions (e.g. a research program with preliminary findings, or a presentation based on a dissertation). Please send your abstract to the organizers (see contact information below).
In anticipation of the conference on ‘the politics of the region in policy transformations’, we invited several scholars in regional policy, science, and politics to examine a range of pressing issues that deserve greater prominence in contemporary regional policy discourse. Furthermore, the platform ‘Overheid van Nu’ published an interview (in Dutch) with Dr. Oemar van der Woerd on ‘the region’ as a governance object in het making that problematizes several regional notions and proposes key questions. We invite you to read the pre-columns below and to engage with these questions (and many others) during the conference discussions. Welcome!
Pre-column by Jan-Kees Helderman, Professor in Social Policy and Governance, Department of Public Administration, Institute for Management Research (IMR), Radboud University Nijmegen.
When Thorbecke designed the ‘framework’ of the decentralised unitary state, he envisaged an organic whole. According to Thorbecke, the state was a polycentric whole comprising relatively autonomous units and elements, between which there is a constantly shifting division of responsibilities. There is no single optimal scale, and any attempt to find one is doomed to failure from the outset. That is why, for example, the Netherlands has not succeeded in establishing city-provinces and why we keep ending up in a maze of regions. Yet, our state is far from anarchy. So, what mechanisms of order are at work here?
I believe there are two ways in which a certain order can emerge within such a polycentric system. The first is through competition and conflict. Here, the law of the strongest or the largest prevails (the largest hospital or the largest municipality). The second way is through cooperation, possibly with gentle coercion from a potential hierarchical intervention, should the local parties be heading too far towards mutual conflict.
But there is another element that has an organising or constitutive effect and is therefore potentially truly unifying. It is true that polycentrism is based on the premise that there is a multitude of relatively independent centres of power which, through constant mutual adaptation and in their dealings with one another, jointly govern a system. But that system is held together by constitutive frameworks and framework legislation.
What is the role of those frameworks, and what does constitutional responsibility ('stelselverantwoordelijkheid') mean in this context?
Pre-column by Dr. Emil Evenhuis, researcher Urban and Regional Development, Department of Urbanisation and Transport of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. His research deals with the question: how should cities and regions engage with economic change? (such as globalisation, de-industrialisation, polarisation in the service sector, and the transition to (more) sustainable development models).
Within ‘the politics of the region’ the relationship between ‘the region’ and the national level is paramount, in particular within a decentralized unitary state such as the Netherlands. However, this relationship is marked by rather unclear governance arrangements in the Netherlands. Firstly, there is often a grey zone regarding which layer of government is ultimately accountable for what, and who should fund what exactly. Secondly, in a territorial sense there is a mismatch between the territories of municipalities and provinces, and the geographical scale at which many policy issues and challenges operate. Hence, several municipalities end up having to work together at a larger regional scale; but the stipulations for such arrangements are rather minimal. Hence in such a context, there is a lot of ‘squabbling’ between different layers of government, as well as between municipalities and provinces themselves. Our experience at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency is that substantive knowledge and expertise about the particularities of a region, its issues and opportunities, and the functional relationships across space (e.g. in terms of commuting, supply chains, use of amenities, mobility patterns, etc.) then become even more important. This is crucial input to settle any disputes and move forward. There is, however, a shortage of such knowledge and expertise within and about many regions in the Netherlands.
Pre-column by Edith Hooge, Professor of Education Policy and Governance at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.
The governance arrangements within Dutch education have long been a subject of debate. The education system is continuously searching for a ‘vertical balance of power’ between central, provincial and local authorities, regional bodies and school boards.
With the establishment of the Batavian Republic in 1795, municipalities initially assumed a central role in governing education, understood as a form of territorial decentralization. After the Pacification of 1917, however, the governance of education became highly centralized. Although the central government's role was largely limited to administration, funding allocation and supervision, functional decentralization also emerged: school boards and their representative organizations were given authority over the content and organization of the education system.
As the Netherlands began to ‘depillarize’ in the late 1960s, driven by secularization and democratization, centralization increased. The central government took a leading role in restructuring the education system (the so-called ‘Mammoth Act’) and in formulating policy ambitions.
In 1975, nearly sixty years after the Pacification, the minister proposed plans for territorial decentralization. Not only municipalities and provinces, but also ‘the region’ was identified as the preferred level to which educational responsibilities and powers could be transferred. These plans met with criticism. Opponents feared that regional governance would lead to undesirable local differences and would undermine the constitutional freedom of education by school boards. The plans were therefore quickly abandoned. From the early 1980s onward, policy once again favored functional decentralization, granting greater autonomy to school boards through scaling up, professionalization, and strengthened school management.
In the 1990s, territorial decentralization toward municipalities was cautiously revisited. However, it was not until 2018 that the region was once again identified as governance level in education. From then on, developments accelerated: educational regions were established, preceded by so-called RAL (regional approach to teacher shortages) and RAP (regional approach to personnel shortages) regions. The National Growth Fund began financing educational programmes based on regional approaches, while the central government increasingly funded regional networks rather than individual school boards.
By 2026, expectations of regional collaboration in education have become substantial. Where central steering does not sufficiently address local differences, and where individual school boards and municipalities often lack the capacity to tackle challenges on their own, hope is increasingly placed in regional governance. The region presents opportunities to tackle cross-sector societal challenges through a growing contribution from education. Regional collaboration also seems to be the answer to unwanted competition within education when such dynamics hinder broader public interests.
But are these high expectations justified? And has the region finally become the level at which a ‘vertical balance of power’ in education can be achieved?
Download invitation and call for abstract
Registration
- More information
Please do not hesitate to contact the organizers if there are any questions regarding the invitation and open call:
Dr. Oemar van der Woerd (vanderwoerd@eshpm.eur.nl)
Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University RotterdamDr. Sam Muller (s.h.a.muller@uu.nl)
Utrecht University School of Governance, Utrecht University
