Towards Multi-Level Territorial Governance in Hungary

Abstract: This thesis sets out to develop credible scenarios outlining the future territorial governance system of Hungary. The overview on the challenges of the Hungarian spatial development pointed to a direction of the lacking overarching administrative background concept. The EU discourse on territorial policies, spearheaded by the Territorial Agenda 2020 has become more and more influenced by the contemporary organizational concepts of public administration. With associating two notable conceptions, the Multi-level Governance and the Territorial Governance, the author has created a spectacle, under which the main characteristics of the dominant European spatial planning models (namely the Nordic-, the Anglo-Saxon- and the French variants) have become comparable. The main features of the models have been organized into matrices along three major aspects of inquiry: The quality of governance, multi-level relations and multi-level structure. These matrices served as a reliable framework for the scenario-writing process, which outlined four possible paths for the territorial administrative system of Hungary.