Advocates of regional political cooperation find favor with political theorists while encountering widespread rejection by real-world governments. Why do practitioners often fail to follow the reformers? Employing a comparative perspective, this analysis examines theories of regional reform and then surveys metropolitan political cooperation within a context that theorists expect should be highly supportive of it—Randstad Holland and the Amsterdam metropolitan area. Regional political development finds little success in this region. Dutch experience suggests that regional theory makes unrealistic assumptions about the conditions that favor intergovernmental cooperation and underestimates the political barriers to this kind of reform.
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