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rules, and negotiations with an increasing number of actors. Public policy is character- ized by ad hoc or contingency arrangements and enmeshed networks, randomly by a proliferation of actors, multiple aims, hetero- geneity, cross-linking of issues and changes in the scales of reference territories. The capacity for direction of the state is subject to challenge; it seems to be losing its monopoly and is less the centre of political processes or of conflict regulation. At the same time, scholars identify logics of state expansion and recentralization (Gamble, 1993; Jacobs and King, 2009).