The Amsterdam Metropolitan Area challenge: opportunities for inclusive coproduction in city-region governance

The city-regional level has gained importance in various planning systems as a result of the continuous need to solve strategic planning issues that transcend political and jurisdictional boundaries. Governance through voluntary policy networks gained importance as a way to make policy objective delivery at this city-regional level more effective and efficient. However, the multilevel organized accountability of policy networks with different logics and rationalities challenges policy implementation processes. This paper develops a framework to analyze and understand how the structure of voluntary city-regional policy networks affects the effectiveness, efficiency, and democratic legitimacy of these networks and the policies they create. Using the case of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area as an example, we show that city-region governance needs to involve not only government interests but also interests of market players and NGOs to become effective, efficient, and legitimate and that national policy interference is to a large extent incompatible with it.