Institutional Barriers to Associative City-region Governance: The Politics of Institution-building and Economic Governance in 'Canada's Technology Triangle'
Available accessResearch articleFirst published online December, 2003
Institutional Barriers to Associative City-region Governance: The Politics of Institution-building and Economic Governance in 'Canada's Technology Triangle'
It has been argued that collaborative and associative forms of governance can enhance the economic competitiveness of cities and regions. Institutionalist approaches to urban and regional economic development have been particularly influential in emphasising the potential role that collaboration between firms, governance agencies, labour and supporting institutions can play in enabling communities to promote progressive competitiveness. At the same time, there has been relatively little discussion and empirical analysis of the actual process of institutional change and institution-building that characterise city-regions situated in liberal political economies that are not historically endowed with 'pre-existing' stocks of social capital and associative governance. In addition, institutionalist perspectives on urban and regional economic change have produced economistic explanations, while underplaying the importance of political factors. This paper offers an analysis of the various institutional barriers to associative governance by examining the case of 'Canada's Technology Triangle', a city-region which has experienced several attempts to develop associative governance institutions since the early 1990s. The evidence from this case study suggests that the experience of institution-building in this city-region has been intertwined with a struggle to create a regional scale of engagement for a range of governance actors. The analysis in this paper demonstrates the importance of paying careful attention to the factors that shape the political mobilisation of actors into associative institutional structures.
References
1.
Allen, J., MAssey, D. and Cochrane, A. (1998) Rethinking the Region. London : Routledge.
2.
Amin, A. (1999) An institutionalist perspective on regional economic development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 23, 365-378.
3.
Amin, A. and Hausner, J. (Eds) (1997) Beyond Market and Hierarchy: Interactive Governance and Social Complexity. Aldershot : Edward Elgar.
4.
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (1995a) Living in the global, in: A. Amin and N. Thrift (Eds) Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, pp. 1-22. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
5.
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (1995b) Globalization, institutional 'thickness' and the local economy, in: P. Healey ET Al. (Eds) Managing Cities: The New Urban Context , pp. 91-108. Chichester : Wiley.
6.
Asheim, B. (2001) Learning regions as development coalitions: partnership as governance in European workfare states?, Concepts and Transformation , 6, pp. 73-101.
7.
Asheim, B. and Dunford, M. (1997) Regional futures, Regional Studies , 31, pp. 445-457.
8.
Best, M. (1990) The New Competition. London : Polity Press.
9.
Bradford, N. (1998) Prospects for associative governance: lessons from Ontario, Canada, Politics and Society, 26(4), pp. 539-573.
10.
Coleman, J. ( 1988) Social capital in the creation of human capital , American Journal of Sociology, 94, pp. 95-120.
11.
Cooke, P. (1995) Keeping to the high road: learning, reflexivity and associative governance in regional economic development, in: P. Cooke (Ed.) The Rise of the Rustbelt , pp. 231-245. London: UCL Press.
12.
Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1993) The network paradigm: new departures in corporate and regional development, Environment and Planning D, 11, pp. 543-564.
13.
Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1995) Growth regions under duress: renewal strategies in Baden Wurttenberg and Emilia-Romagna, in: A. Amin and N. Thrift (Eds) Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, pp. 91-117. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
14.
Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998) The Associational Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
15.
Cox, K.R. (1998) Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement, and the politics of scale: or looking for local politics, Political Geography, 17, pp. 1-23.
16.
Cox, K.R. and Mair, A. (1988) Locality and community in the politics of local economic development, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78(2), pp. 307-325.
17.
Cox, K.R. and Mair, A. (1989) Urban growth machines and the politics of local economic development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13, pp. 137-146.
18.
Cox, K.R. and Wood, A. (1996) Competition and co-operation in mediating the global: the case of local economic development, Competition and Change , 14, pp. 1-20.
19.
Crane, D. (1997) Technology triangle a model for job and wealth creation, Toronto Star, September 16.
20.
Digaetan, A. and Kleman, J.S. (1993) Urban regimes in comparative perspective: the politics of urban development in Britain, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 29, pp. 45-83.
21.
Dosi, G., Freeman, C. , Nelson, R. ET Al. (Eds) ( 1988) Technical Change and Economic Theory. London: Pinter.
22.
Dowding, K. (2001) Explaining urban regimes, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25, pp. 7-19.
23.
Filion, P. and Rutherford, T. (1996) Manufacturing miracles? The restructuring of Waterloo Region's manufacturing, in P. Filion, T. Bunting and K. Curtis (Eds) The Dynamics of the Dispersed City, pp. 239-271. Department of Geography Publication Series, University of Waterloo, Ont.
24.
Florida, R. (1995) Toward the learning region, Futures , 27, pp. 527-536.
25.
Freeman, C. (1994) Critical survey: the economics of technical change , Cambridge Journal of Economics, 18, pp. 463-512.
26.
Fukuyama, F. (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity . London: Hamish Hamilton.
27.
Gertler, M.S. (1995) 'Being there': proximity, organisation, and culture in the development and adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies, Economic Geography, 71, pp. 1-26.
28.
Gertler, M.S. (1997) The invention of regional culture, in: R. Lee and J. Wills (Eds) Geographies of Economies, pp. 47-58. London : Edward Arnold.
29.
Gertler, M.S. and Wolfe, D. (1998) The dynamics of regional innovation in Ontario , in: J. De La Moth and G. Paquet (Eds) Local and Regional Systems of Innovation, pp. 211-238. Amsterdam: Kluwer .
30.
Gertler, M.S. and Wolfe, D. A. (Eds) (2002) Innovation and Social Learning: Institutional Adaption in an Era of Technological Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
31.
Glassmeier, A. (1995) Flexible districts, flexible regions? The institutional and cultural limits to districts in an era of globalisation and technological paradigm shift, in: A. Amin and N. Thrift (Eds) Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, pp. 118-146. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
32.
Graham, K.A., Phillips, S.D. and Maslove, A.M. (1998) Urban Governance in Canada: Representation, Resources, and Restructuring. Toronto: Harcourt Brace.
33.
Granovetter, M. (1985) Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology, 91, pp. 481-510.
34.
Harding, A. (1994) Urban regimes and growth machines: towards a cross national research agenda, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 29, pp. 356-382.
35.
Hastings, A. (1996) Unravelling the process of 'partnership' in urban regeneration policy, Urban Studies, 33(2), pp. 253-268.
36.
Healey, P. (1998) Building institutional capacity through collaborative approaches to urban planning, Environment and Planning A, 30, pp. 1531-1546.
37.
Healey, P. (2002) On creating the 'city' as a collective resource, UrbanStudies, 39, pp. 1777-1792.
38.
Henry, N. and Pinch, S. (2000) Spatialising knowledge: placing the knowledge community of Motor Sport Valley, Geoforum, 31, pp. 191-208.
39.
Hirst, P. (1994) Associative Democracy. Cambridge : Polity Press.
40.
Hirst, P. (2000) Statism, pluralism and social control, British Journal of Criminology, 40(2), 279-295.
41.
HoDGsoN, G. M. (1993) Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back to Economics. Cambridge : Polity Press.
42.
Hudson, R. (1995) Institutional change, cultural transformation, and economic regeneration: myth and realities from Europe's old industrial areas, in: A. Amin and N. Thrift (Eds) Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, pp. 196-216. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
43.
Immergut, E.M. (1992) An institutional critique of associative democracy: commentary on 'secondary associations and democratic governance', Politics and Society, 20(4), pp. 481.
44.
Jessop, B. (2000) Governance failure, in: G. Stoker (Ed.) The New Politics of British Local Governance , pp. 11-32. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
45.
Jonas, A.E.G. (1996) In search of order: traditional business reformism and the crisis of neoliberalism in Massachusetts, Transactions iof the Institute of British Geographers NS, 21, pp.617-634.
46.
Jung, H. (1995) An evaluation of the local production network system in the context of the flexible production paradigm: the case of small and medium sized enterprises in Kitchener-Waterloo. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, Ontario.
47.
Keating, M. (2001) Rethinking the region: culture, institutions and economic development in Catalonia and Galicia, European Urban and Regional Studies, 8, pp. 217-234.
48.
Kitchener-Waterloo Record (1998) Editorial, 5 May.
49.
Langendijk, A. (1999) The emergence of knowledge-oriented forms of regional policy in Europe, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 90(1), pp. 110-116.
50.
Lawson, C. and Lorenz, E. (1999) Collective learning, tacit knowledge and regional innovative capacity, Regional Studies, 33, pp. 305-317.
51.
Leibovitz, J. (1999) New spaces of governance: re-reading the local state in Ontario, Space and Polity, 3, pp. 199-216.
52.
Leibovitz, J. (2001) Associative governance? The political economy of institutional change in two Ontario city-regions. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto.
53.
Leitner, H. and Sheppard, E. (2002) 'The city is dead, long live the net': harnessing European international networks for a neo-liberal agenda, Antipode, 34, pp. 495-518.
54.
Lovering, J. (1999) Theory led by policy: the inadequacies of the 'new regionalism', International Journal of Urban andRegional Studies, 23, pp. 379-395.
55.
Lowndes, V. (2001) Rescuing Aunt Sally: taking institutional theory seriously in urban politics, Urban Studies, 38, pp. 1953-1971.
56.
Lowndes, V. and Wilson, D. (2001) Social capital and local governance: exploring the institutional design variable, Political Studies, 49, pp. 629-647.
57.
LuNDvALL, B. A. (Ed.) (1992) National Systems of Innovation: Towards a Theory of Innovation and Interactive Learning. London: Pinter.
58.
Mackintosh, M. (1992) Partnership: issues of policy and negotiation, Local Economy, 7, pp. 210-224.
59.
Macleod, G. (1997) 'Institutional thickness' and industrial governance in Lowland Scotland, Area, 29, pp. 299-311.
60.
Macleod, G. (2001) Beyond soft institutional-ism: accumulation, regulation, and their geographical fixes, Environment and Planning A, 33, pp. 1145-1167.
61.
Macleod, G. and Goodwin, M. (1999) Reconstructing and urban and regional political economy: on the state, politics, scale, and explanation, Political Geography, 18, pp. 697-730.
62.
Maloney, W., Smith, G. and Stoker, G. (2000) Social capital and urban governance: adding a more contextual 'top-down' perspectives, Political Studies, 48, pp. 802-820.
63.
Massey, D., Quintas, P. and Wield, D. (1992) High Tech Fantasies. London : Routledge.
64.
Mclaughlin, K. (1990) Waterloo: An Illustrated History. Windsor, Ont.: Windsor Publications.
65.
Morgan, K. (1997) The learning region: institutions, innovation and regional renewal, Regional Studies, 31, pp. 491-503.
66.
Nelson, R. (ed.) (1993) National Innovation Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
67.
Peck, J. (1995) Moving and shaking: business elites, state localism and urban privatism, Progress in Human Geography, 19, pp. 16-46.
68.
Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (1994) Searching for a new institutional fix: the after Fordist crisis and global-local disorder, in A. Amin (ed.) Post Fordism: A Reader, pp. 280-315. Oxford : Blackwell.
69.
Phelps, N.A. and Tewdwr-Jones, M. (1998) Institutional capacity building in a strategic policy vacuum: the case of the Korean company LG in South Wales , Environment and PlanningC, 16, pp. 735-755.
70.
Phelps, N.A. and Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2000) Scratching the surface of collaborative and associative governance: identifying the diversity of social action in institutional capacity building, Environment and Planning A, 32, pp. 111-130.
71.
Pierre, J. (1999) Models of urban governance: the institutional dimension of urban politics, Urban Affairs Review, 34(3), pp. 372-396.
72.
Pinch, S. and Henry, N. (1999) Paul Krugman's geographical economics, industrial districts and the British motor sport industry, Regional Studies , 33, pp. 815-827.
73.
Putnam, R. (1993) Making Democracy Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
74.
Putnam, R. (1995) Bowling alone: America's declining social capital , Journal of Democracy, 6(1), pp. 65-78.
75.
Raco, M. (1998) Assessing 'institutional thickness' in the local context: a comparison of Cardiff and Sheffield, Environment and Planning A, 30, pp. 975-996.
76.
Raco, M. (1999) Competition, collaboration and the new industrial districts: examining the institutional turn in local economic development, UrbanStudies, 36, pp. 951-968.
77.
Sabel, C. (1993) 'Studied trust': building new forms of co-operation in a volatile economy, Human Relations, 46, pp. 1133-1170.
78.
Scott, A.J. (1996) The collective order of flexible production agglomerations: lessons for local economic development policy and strategic choice, Economic Geography, 72(3), pp. 219-313.
79.
Smith, L. (1996) Dynamic Profile of the Economy of the Waterloo Region. Regional Municipality of Waterloo, Kitchener, Ont.
80.
Stoker, G. and Mossberger, K. (1994) Urban regime theory in comparative perspective , Environment and Planning C, 12, pp. 195-212.
81.
Stone, C. (1989) Regime Politics. Lawrence, KS : University of Kansas Press.
82.
Stone, C.N. (1993) Urban regimes and the capacity to govern: a political economy approach, Journal of Urban Affairs, 15(1), pp. 1-28.
83.
Stone, C.N. (2001) The Atlanta experience re-examined: the link between agenda setting and regime change, International Journal of Urban and Regional Change, 25, pp. 20-34.
84.
Storper, M. (1995) The resurgence of regional economies, ten years later, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2(3), pp. 191-221.
85.
Storper, M. (1997) The Regional World. New York : Guilford Press.
86.
Streeck, W. (1992) Inclusion and secession: questions on the boundaries of associative democracies, Politics and Society, 20(4), p. 513.
87.
Swanstrom, T. (2001) What we argue about when we argue about regionalism , Journal of Urban Affairs, 23, pp. 479-496.
88.
Walker, D.F. (1987) Expansion and adaptation in the post-war years , in: D. F. Walker (Ed.) Manufacturing in Kitchener-Waterloo: A Long-Term Perspective, pp. 61-82. Waterloo, Ont. : University of Waterloo Press.
89.
Wood, A. (1993) Organizing for local economic development: local economic development networks and prospecting for industry, Environment and Planning A, 25, pp. 1649-1661.
