Shifts in Governance in a Polycentric Urban Region: The Case of the Dutch Randstad

The Dutch Randstad is governed by a complex, polycentric institutional structure. In the past, many attempts to streamline the formal institutional structure have failed. However, within the basically unchanged formal structure important informal-institutional changes have been realized. They present shifts in governance rather than reorganizations of government. They present a flexible response to the pressures of glocalization, in the sense that they reflect both patterns of administrative down-scaling (localization at the level of specific issues and neighborhoods) and administrative up-scaling (regionalization at the level of the interurban conurbation). The flexible response is developing in practice, without a master plan or a master planner, and in that sense more in line with the underlying polycentric logic of the Dutch Randstad than previous attempts at finding the ultimate institutional fix.