The paper focuses on the institutional solutions adopted in various Polish metropolitan regions due to the requirement to create structures facilitating the operation of Integrated Territorial Investment (ITI) in the 2014-2020 EU financial perspective. This phenomenon is analysed in the light of the process of the launching and functioning of metropolitan cooperation and of the concept of Europeanization. Our considerations are based on the assumption that past attempts to institutionalize metropolitan cooperation influence the process of the creation and functioning of ITI cooperation. Our research has confirmed this proposition. We found various reactions to the top-down incentive in all of the investigated metropolitan regions. In general four main types of situation are identified depending on past metropolitan cooperation and its relation to the ITI institutions. On the national level an interesting "double top-down" pressure was discovered, as the EU guidelines have been made much stricter by the Polish government, turning an incentive for local actors into a must. Finally, Integrated Territorial Investment has enlivened metropolitan governance in Poland, which is interesting to follow in the future, especially as it has no connection to other national regulations proposed for metropolitan regions.

The governance of metropolitan affairs emerges as one of the crucial issues in many countries. The academic debate shows a bias towards categories and descriptions based on North American and, to a lesser degree, West European experiences. Based on the results of comparative research on metropolitan regions in Germany and in Poland, we can say that there is much more diversity than convergence in the practice of regional reform in the studied cases. Moreover, the normative and analytical framework of the new regionalism is not as appropriate to describe the Polish and -to a lesser extent -the German metropolitan reality as it is widely assumed. Recently emerging metropolitan arrangements bear the features of novelty, but at the same time most of them still lean strongly on governmental premises. Surprisingly, despite obvious differences between the two countries, some cross-national similarities are noticeable between the metropolises, which share some characteristics such as the position of a front-runner in the national economy or the national exponent in the global city hierarchy. The main difference can be identified in the economic focus of the metropolitan governance arrangements. Whereas this is a dominant approach in German city-regions, in Poland it still remains low on the agenda, at least in practice. Moreover the involvement of non-governmental actors in metropolitan initiatives is much lower in Poland.

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