In this Practitioner Commentary, we develop the argument that the 21st century polycrisis has widened the gap between the demand side and supply side of governance. State capacity is put to the test while the policy space to deliver public goods has shrunk. The region state is a unit of governance, often overlooked and underutilized, to boost state capacity across siloed policy domains and institutional stovepipes. The European Union provides a laboratory to showcase and test the comparative advantage of governance solutions that reconnect the local, state, and supranational policy levels.
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