This book aims to understand the “texture” of the post-Soviet region, where waves of de-integration and re-integration have been resonating at different times and through diverse manifestations over the last quarter of century. The post-Soviet states have been evolving in an embryonic system of states in their close neighbourhood, whose boundaries and rules of interactions are still in the making. However, one can already detect specific traits of regional governance, one of these being the presence of overlapping organisations and institutions. It includes reflections on relations between state formation and region formation and a tentative conceptualisation of a post-colonial form of regionalism. The focus on small states, featuring different behaviours vis-à-vis regional organisations and regional imaginaries in their transitional and still unsettled state identities and foreign policy narratives, constitutes a further element of originality. This innovative volume is crucial reading for scholars and researchers of International Relations with a special interest in either the Former Soviet Space or Comparative Regionalism.

Regions in Transition provides an in-depth analysis of the dramatic influence of the Great Depression upon the geography, politics, economics, and demography of the Northern Great Plains and Pacific Northwest. Author Rolland Dewing, who participated in the Dust Bowl migration and has lived more than thirty years in each region, brings a unique voice to this history, which references evidence from local histories, on-site visits and interviews, scholarly research, government documents, and local newspapers.

This report builds on work presented in the OECD’s 2019 report Regions in Industrial Transition: Policies for People and Places. It considers industrial transition as a complex and enduring challenge in regional development that traditional policy levers have not always been unable to satisfactorily address.

This book analyses the potential for active stakeholder engagement in the energy transition in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) in order to foster clean energy deployment. Public acceptability and bottom-up activities can be critical for enduring outcomes to an energy transition. As a result, it is vital to understand how to unlock the potential for public, community and prosumer participation to facilitate renewable energy deployment and a clean energy transition – and, consequently, to examine the factors influencing social acceptability. Focussing on the diverse BSR, this book draws on expert contributions to consider a range of different topics, including the challenges of social acceptance and its policy implications; strategies to address challenges of acceptability among stakeholders; and community engagement in clean energy production. Overall, the authors examine the practical implications of current policy measures and provide recommendations on how lessons learnt from this ‘energy lab region’ may be applied to other regions. Reflecting an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences, this book is an essential resource for scholars, students and policymakers researching and working in the areas of renewable energy, energy policy and citizen engagement, and interested in understanding the potential for bottom-up, grassroots activities and social acceptability to expedite the energy transition and reanimate democracies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The recent crises in global economy and in European integration have caused a considerable revival of interest in the Nordic Welfare Model. However, less attention has been given to the ways in which the nations that form Scandinavia or ‘Norden’ are connected through various forms of inter- and transnational cooperation. With contributions from a team of experts in the field, this volume analyses Nordic cooperation in a European perspective and argues that this special form of transnational cooperation has been crucial in the development of the Nordic Welfare Model. In addition, it also contends that the Nordic model of transnational cooperation is a relevant case study when pondering the present problems of European integration. This text will be of key interest to students, researchers and policy makers studying the Nordic Model and transnational cooperation and more generally to those interested in European studies, Scandinavian studies, welfare studies, international relations and regional integration.