Organising Capacity — Regionale Handlungsfähigkeit von Regionen im demographischen Wandel

Abstract

Demographic change is currently posing major challenges for regions and facing them with conflicts (especially regarding the distribution of infrastructure) which call increasingly for co-operative solutions involving other territorial authorities as well as the involvement of the private sector and civil society. This broadening of the range of actors involved in turn requires a form of network-based regional governance geared increasingly to promoting cooperation. Against the background of demographic change, Regional Governance aims to initiate processes of self-organisation, i.e. to create the capacity to act autonomously at regional level, and to improve the self-organising capacity to both sub-regions and of a region in its entirety. In order to show how this capacity to act at regional level might be established, the following article takes the Braunschweig region as a case in point to illustrate the development of this type of „organising capacity”.