TY - JOUR
T1 - Towards a regional renaissance? Reconfiguring and rescaling England's economic governance
AU - Jones, Martin Russell
AU - MacLeod, Gordon
N1 - Jones, M., MacLeod, G. (1999). Towards a Regional Renaissance? Reconfiguring and Rescaling England's Economic Governance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (3), 295-313.
PY - 1999/9
Y1 - 1999/9
N2 - Recent years have witnessed a tremendous academic and political appeal to the regional scale as the key with which to rear economic and social revitalization. Learning from exemplars such as Baden Württemberg, certain proponents of a purported ‘new regionalism’ advocate that the economic and democratic deficit in less-favoured regions may be revitalized by fostering a series of interacting social, economic and institutional networks. This paper provides a discussion of some of the more sophisticated approaches heralding a regional renaissance. These are then deployed through a case study of the restructuring and rescaling of England's economic governance in the late 1990s via the establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Focusing on the experience of the North-West region, their analysis reveals that, whilst useful as a form of contextualizing regional transformation and governance, the new regionalist approaches are unable to provide a rigorous framework through which to consider England's own peculiar regional ‘resurgence’. In turn, the authors call for a serious consideration of the state as a critical animateur in both structuring and scaling economic and civic life. The paper concludes that in future research, a lack of sensitivity to situated path-dependent regional economic and political geographies may serve to reproduce the ‘fantasies’ inherent in some earlier (post-Fordist)‘transition models'.
AB - Recent years have witnessed a tremendous academic and political appeal to the regional scale as the key with which to rear economic and social revitalization. Learning from exemplars such as Baden Württemberg, certain proponents of a purported ‘new regionalism’ advocate that the economic and democratic deficit in less-favoured regions may be revitalized by fostering a series of interacting social, economic and institutional networks. This paper provides a discussion of some of the more sophisticated approaches heralding a regional renaissance. These are then deployed through a case study of the restructuring and rescaling of England's economic governance in the late 1990s via the establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Focusing on the experience of the North-West region, their analysis reveals that, whilst useful as a form of contextualizing regional transformation and governance, the new regionalist approaches are unable to provide a rigorous framework through which to consider England's own peculiar regional ‘resurgence’. In turn, the authors call for a serious consideration of the state as a critical animateur in both structuring and scaling economic and civic life. The paper concludes that in future research, a lack of sensitivity to situated path-dependent regional economic and political geographies may serve to reproduce the ‘fantasies’ inherent in some earlier (post-Fordist)‘transition models'.
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/2160/8845
U2 - 10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00295.x
DO - 10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00295.x
M3 - Article
SN - 0020-2754
VL - 24
SP - 295
EP - 313
JO - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
JF - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
IS - 3
ER -