Governing Green and Heritage-Led Revitalisation: Multi-Scalar Insights from the Nona Project in the Danube Region

European policy initiatives such as the Green Deal, the New European Bauhaus, and the “No Net Land Take” objective call for sustainable, inclusive, and climate-resilient urban development. Yet many cities, especially small and mid-sized ones, struggle to operationalise these ambitions due to fragmented governance, unclear investment pathways, and limited institutional capacity. Heritage-led regeneration projects face particularly governance challenges: layered approval processes involving multiple heritage authorities, ownership fragmentation across public and private actors, technical uncertainty regarding structural interventions and conservation standards, and persistent institutional silos between heritage protection, urban planning, and economic development mandates. This paper presents findings from the NONA project (New gOvernance for NewspAces), funded under the Danube Region Programme, which developed and tested a governance framework for green and inclusive regeneration of degraded urban areas. At the centre of this approach is a six-phase investment lifecycle that supports cities in structuring regeneration processes, from initial diagnosis through to implementation and long-term monitoring. The lifecycle model addresses recurrent implementation failures in heritage-led regeneration by making dependencies and prerequisites visible at early stages, introducing staged feasibility checks, and clarifying institutional responsibilities before design lock-in occurs. Applied across ten pilot cities in the Danube Region, including Stuttgart, Cluj-Napoca, Odessa, Chișinău, Gabrovo, Veszprém, Šabac, Cazin, Ravne naKoroškem, and Virovitica, the model enabled local actors to align diverse objectives (heritage reuse, climate adaptation, and public space inclusion) with actionable steps tailored to their specific governance and resource environments. The lifecycle approach functions as a coordination and risk-reduction mechanism, helping cities to translate strategic goals into feasible project pipelines through feasibility checks, stakeholder engagement routines, and explicit sequencing of regulatory, technical, and financial prerequisites. The findings demonstrate how a structured, adaptable governance process can bridge the gap between EU policy aspirations and local implementation realities. The paper argues that embedding lifecycle thinking into urban regeneration practice offers a replicable pathway for aligning institutional responsibilities, reducing fragmentation, and mobilising investment across varied urban contexts.