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This issue of Policy and Politics includes a set of articles that examines contemporary trends in territorial governance in Europe. During the 1990s there was an explosion of interest across the social sciences in the transformation of government in many Western European countries that involved the construction of territorial arrangements designed to meet contemporary needs in terms of greater efficiency, effectiveness and democratic legitimacy. This was expressed in extensive accounts of the possible sources of these developments and their significance in terms of the triadic relationship between the European Union (EU), state and subnational governments and, especially, in the emerging 'intermediate' or 'meso' level of regional governance between the centre and the basic municipal or communal level (Sharpe, 1993).There was a general sense that although administrative decentralisation had been applied in some of the larger European states over many years, during the 1980s and 1990s the focus was shifting towards the devolution of political powers to the subnational level, a trend confirmed in the devolution settlements in parts of the UK during the late 1990s. As Patrick Le Gales (1998: 486) observed, although there is no risk to the central state, its 'stranglehold has been released and Europe is witnessing increasingly unstable intergovernmental relations, with the cooperation/competition model giving way to the creation of networks and to the strengthening of intermediate-level innovations'. The focus of the articles is on re-examining whether the rationales that sparked such interest in regionalism in Europe still apply; how the drivers underpinning the decision to strengthen/weaken regional autonomy have changed in different states and what have been the outcomes. In this introduction we examine the influences shaping the relationship between territory and governance, consider their uneven impacts and summaries how these accounts are reflected in the subsequent contributions. Adapted from the source document.