Governance is about relationships, not just rules.
Public decisions rarely happen through formal procedures alone. They depend on the people, organisations and resources around them — and on how these relationships work together.
UGoveRN takes a relational approach to governance: looking beyond individual institutions to understand the connections, dependencies and changing conditions that shape collective action.
Governance happens between actors.
No single organisation controls all the conditions, resources and relationships required to shape an urban outcome.
Authority, knowledge, finance, land, infrastructure and legitimacy are distributed across different actors. Policies and regulations establish important frameworks, but what happens in practice also depends on how actors respond to one another and how circumstances change.
A relational perspective therefore asks not only who formally decides, but which relationships make action possible, where dependencies lie and how those relationships evolve over time.
The focus shifts from individual institutions to the relationships through which governance actually takes place.
Three forces shape what is possible.
Governance emerges through the interaction between formal frameworks, distributed resources and changing circumstances.
Policies & regulations
Decisions sit within multiple layers of rules and responsibilities — from municipal and regional frameworks to national and European regulation.
Actors & resources
Authority, land, infrastructure, finance, knowledge and legitimacy are distributed across different public, private and societal actors.
Changing conditions
Political priorities, costs, markets, climate requirements and previous decisions continuously alter what can be achieved.
Look beyond the formal decision.
A relational perspective examines how decisions work once they encounter the actors and conditions that shape implementation.
Which relationships, resources and actors does an intervention depend on?
How might different actors respond, adapt or push back as decisions take effect?
How do political, economic, social and environmental conditions alter relationships?
How can governance arrangements respond while retaining a clear public purpose?
Governance is not a fixed arrangement. It is a changing set of relationships.
Understanding those relationships helps reveal how collective action becomes possible, where tensions emerge and how governance can respond when conditions change.
From relational governance to spatial development.
The relational perspective also underpins UGoveRN research into urban development.
Rather than treating regulation, property and investment as separate forces, the approach examines how they interact and shape what becomes possible in the city.
Spatial Governance Landscapes
Spatial Governance Landscapes connects planning regulation with property-market strategies, examining how regulatory and investment landscapes interact.
It asks where these landscapes align, where tensions emerge and how their relationships enable, constrain or redirect pathways of urban development.
Understanding the whole landscape.
Instead of analysing each element in isolation, relational governance asks how policies, actors, resources and changing conditions interact to produce urban outcomes.
Policies & regulations
Rules, plans and policy instruments establish frameworks for action.
Actors & resources
Different actors bring authority, knowledge, property, finance and other resources.
Changing conditions
Political, economic, social and environmental circumstances continuously reshape possibilities.
Urban outcomes
Their interaction shapes pathways of development, investment, land use and governance.
Understanding governance through relationships.
Our relational approach connects institutions, actors, resources and changing conditions to understand how governance actually works in practice.