<p>Urban governance initiatives increasingly reflect cities’ engagement with external partners, resources, knowledge, and expertise to address challenges in urban development. In the context of post-socialist, EU candidate countries such as Serbia, these initiatives are most often introduced through international cooperation and EU-funded programmes, and are relatively pioneering within the planning and governance framework. This paper presents a qualitative case study of an urban governance initiative for the revitalisation of a degraded urban area in the city of Šabac, developed within the framework of the Interreg Danube project New Governance for New Spaces (NONA). The research is conducted within the framework of local urban experimentation and examines institutional conditions, local partnerships, and participatory methods to understand how governance initiatives can foster organisational change in planning and participation. The findings indicate that organisational change is supported at the macro-, meso- and micro- levels, and point to their interdependencies. Key moments that enable change are occurring at the intersection of procedural and institutional arrangements, resource availability, and individual openness and learning. Systemic constraints of the transitional urban governance and planning that limit more substantive effects of governance initiatives are highlighted.</p>