Referring to Kiese (2013) and Sternberg et al. (2010), but also other papers such as Crespy et al. (2007) for France, we added that, especially for Germany, we should not underestimate the roles of states and local authorities in the cluster policy. Finally, in the conclusion, we stressed the lack of multilevel governance approach as a limitation, which should be more explicitly considered in future research.
However, sections 4.3 to 4.5 leave an impression that the assessment of these cases as ‘bottom-up’ is not completely justified. The authors seem to assume that cluster policies are either bottom-up or top-down, without any shades of grey in between.