Shaping port governance: the territorial trajectories of reform

The evolution of public-private relationships has driven many economic sectors to undergo de-centralisation and de-regulation. Across these transformations, an appreciation of governance is key to understanding the process. In recent years, seaports have experienced dramatic changes in governance reported in academic and policy literature. The World Bank, for example, outlined a well-known taxonomy of major governance models. However, this literature does not capture of the specificities of local environments, or “embed” the changes in specific institutional and economic contexts. This paper analyses the embeddedness in ports and their associated governance structures. We analyse and discuss (i) the complexity and the heterogeneity of the institutional framework, (ii) the multi-layered decisional chain, (iii) the geo-economic dimension, and (iv) and the socio-cultural environment of reformed ports. The paper takes a dynamic view of port reform trajectories. We illustrate the theoretical discussion with a comparison of ports in France and Italy. We show the effects of local forces in shaping general national port reform schemes, and we examine the relationship between general global trends and embeddedness.