Regional Development Agencies as a Means of European Union : Globalization and Regionalization of Global Competition

Today, in the process of conceptualizing the regional development and in the strategies toward implementing the regional policies, the significant changes and developments are experienced. These changes have begun with the theoretical fundamentals of regional development as well as the new factors explaining the developmental aspect of change and continued with the developments in aims, targets and activity areas. In this frame, we see that the approach of regional development underwent change from the understanding of from " top - down" planning and development, where centralized administration undertakes a leadership role, to the understanding of "down-top" planning and development , where local economic actors undertake more effective functions and provided an improvement. The development process coming together with the change in the regional development policy, especially European countries, in numerous countries, leaded to forming of the new regulation mechanism in local level and emerging of local regulations and new institutes and organizations.