Adopting the OECD Regional Attractiveness Approach to Enhance the Capacity of Local and Regional Governments in Latvia

Latvia's regions and municipalities face persistent disparities in economic performance, connectivity, and access to services - yet many possess significant untapped assets in natural capital, cultural amenities, and entrepreneurship. This report supports Latvia in translating those assets into more balanced and sustainable territorial development, by providing two interconnected contributions. First, it introduces the OECD Regional Attractiveness framework, applied at the municipal level for the first time in any OECD country, as a practical tool for subnational governments to diagnose territorial strengths and constraints, identify opportunities for co-operation, and monitor progress against regional development objectives. Five concrete use cases demonstrate how multidimensional, internationally comparable indicators can strengthen evidence-based policymaking across the full regional development cycle - from strategy design and investment programming to monitoring and evaluation. Second, it examines Latvia's multi-level governance framework, identifying the co-ordination, financing, and capacity gaps that currently limit the ability of planning regions and municipalities to fulfil their mandates. Together, the two analyses point toward a more integrated approach to regional development - one in which stronger governance frameworks, better-resourced subnational institutions, and systematic use of multidimensional territorial data reinforce each other in support of more attractive, competitive, and resilient Latvian regions.