Crisis and disorder in British local economic governance: Business Link and the Single Regeneration Budget

This paper explores the rise of local economic governance in Britain. It argues that local economic governance is associated with the rise of non-elected state forms and a multitude of partnership arrangements involving the public and private sector. This modus operandi is to be contrasted with economic government — the traditional method of managing the local state through the organisational forms of local government. Using the analytical tools of regulation theory, the paper unravels some of the problems caused by the implementation of local economic governance — namely public accountability (resulting from implementation confusion and leading to a democratic deficit), and funding (resulting from performance-based management and fostering short-termism, leading to partnership friction). The paper illustrates these issues by way of a discussion on two contemporary, local economic policy experiments — Business Link and the Single Regeneration Budget.