From the regional process towards a net system. (Regions and Autonomous Regions in the dawn of the 21st century)

Abstract

The perception of the Spanish autonomic process is conditional on the inertia of a controversial process that would answer the period of “fight for competences”. This period seems to be coming to an end, and the new perspectives of territorial regulation are facing a new phenomenon: the tendency to emulation and horizontal learning among Autonomous Regions regarding laws, policies and organizational experiences, relatively out of the active role of the central government. It is a tendency that reflects at the same time rising processes of adaptation to the external globalised context whose future development could be a reasonable way out against alternative tendencies of blocking the territorial Spanish process. The new perspectives of the so called “multilevel government” place the territorial map before an interactive process that begins operating like a rising “net system”, designing new future lines for the European regionalism.