Understanding the Emergence of the Spanish Urban Agenda: Moving Towards a New Multi-level Urban Policy Scenario?

Abstract

The urban question has attracted the attention of decision-makers in the last years. As a result, several stakeholders and government levels are launching the development of their urban agendas, a trend that can be observed particularly in some EU member states. In this context, Spain emerges as an interesting case since it has just approved its national urban agenda: the Spanish Urban Agenda (SUA). This is the first time that the country has adopted a national framework for urban policies. One of the reasons for this is the formal sharing of competences between the different territorial levels, in which the national, regional and local governments have not yet developed effective mechanisms for working collaboratively in the urban development policy field. The distribution of power has evolved into a fragmented urban policy scenario. In this context, the multi-level governance (MLG) issue becomes a relevant aspect that needs to be addressed by the SUA in order to become a real transformative instrument. This chapter develops an analytical framework aimed at assessing to what extent the SUA has made relevant progress in this regard. The results show that even if the institutional setting remains the same, the SUA tries to overcome the so-called MLG gaps introducing a MLG approach. The SUA does not only consider the limitations of the political context, but also introduces a series of mechanisms that reinforce, on the one hand, the relationship between the national and the local levels and, on the other, its orientation to implementation.