The Emergence of Metropolitan Governance: A coevolutionary analysis of the life-and-death cycles of metropolitan governance in the Amsterdam metropolitan region

Abstract

This article develops an explanation for the emergence of metropolitan governance in the Amsterdam metropolitan region. A coevolutionary framework is deployed to analyze how the governance system developed between 1982 and 2009. Data was gathered from 43 policy documents, over 150 newspaper articles and 14 semi-structured interviews. The analysis focuses on the workings of selection pressures and the adaptive processes. It shows that metropolitan governance evolves in a punctuated fashion when fitness with the environment is lost and when the governance system’s ability to absorb selection pressures has eroded.