Abstract
Local Enterprise Partnerships in England were intended as organic entities in which coalitions of local actors, led by business interests, would determine locally relevant policy for self-defined spatial units. Informed by ideas around localism and the desire to extend sub-national economic development policy making beyond the local state, central government envisaged an increased unevenness in local governance arrangements and policy approaches. The article assesses the experiences of four Local Enterprise Partnerships, employing social network analysis in an attempt to systematise the comparison of actor relationships and urban governance arrangements. The article considers the degree to which the discursive emphasis on liberating local policy actors from central government control has any empirical basis in the variable shape and structure of local elite actor networks. It argues that although Local Enterprise Partnerships operate within an environment characterised by lighter touch regulation, there is a dissonance between local discretion and the political imperative for central government to exercise oversight. Equally, variability in the web of actor interactions across the sample of Local Enterprise Partnerships suggests that asymmetrical urban governance and competitive localism are intrinsic features of post-regional local economic development, reflecting a wider national framework for spatial policy in which diversity in sub-national institutional form is viewed as a source of policy innovation and dynamism.
Keywords
Introduction
The emergence of new city-regional and other sub-national institutions in different international contexts has garnered extensive academic interest. Although institution building has been driven by common sets of concern, governance and policy outcomes have sometimes been asymmetrical, reflecting the variable nature of territorial management approaches employed by national governments, but also the differential chemistry of local actor and institutional interrelationships. This is in line with a wider, and extensively documented, decline of what Brenner (2004: 106) terms the ‘scalar similarity’ of the stable, ordered and predictable institutional forms associated with spatial Keynesianism, and their replacement with a ‘scalar multiplicity’ of local governance arrangements characterised by their diversity, flexibility and impermanence. Although there have been systematic and formal efforts by nation-states, driven by narratives about the internationalisation of economic activity, to bolster sub-national governance and promote more ‘competitive’ cities and regions, there has also been scope for organic, locally-rooted experimentation in territorial governance – with the effect that an array of different institutional and policy outcomes are in evidence.
This variability has meant fertile ground for research on the emergence of sub-national, city and region-based governance. First, there has been a welter of conceptually driven research, around a central notion that the geographical organisation of the state has undergone fundamental change, linked in particular to global economic restructuring and the internationalised nature of capital, the related perception that nation-states have reduced ability and readiness directly to manage economic change, and an increased assertiveness on the part on some cities and regions to compete to harness the benefits from what is said to be the increasingly agglomerative nature of contemporary urban economic development (see, for example, Harrison, 2012; Jonas, 2012; Scott, 2001). Second, there has been considerable academic interest in more narrowly defined policy and institutional issues, focusing on both the experiences of recently established governance structures, and reflecting uncertainties around the particular direction of policy on cities and regions in different countries (for example, Harding, 2007; Shaw and Greenhalgh, 2010). And third, reflecting the uneven nature of institution building, there has been wide-ranging academic interest in the case study experiences of individual cities and regions (see, amongst numerous examples documenting international experience, Kantor et al., 2012; McGuirk, 2007; Yang, 2005).
This article reports on research to understand actor interrelationships and institutional dynamics associated with sub-national territorial governance. It explores the experience of efforts to construct Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England. These were intended in part to replace Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), established by the Labour Government in 1999 to promote economic development for eight prescribed English regions. Unlike the RDAs, however, the geography of the LEPs was to be determined partly through a bottom-up process, in which coalitions of local actors would form around coherent spatial units which related closely to self-defined functional labour market geographies. This, in turn, was in line with a wider government approach that was to some extent permissive in terms of the precise nature of local institutional arrangements, reflecting the ruling Coalition administration’s localism agenda and its desire to extend local economic development policy making beyond the local state and to embrace a wider range of actors from civil society and business. Although the scope of local autonomy was circumscribed by a central government approval process which saw some LEP proposals rejected and others subject to revision, there was nonetheless a tolerance from the centre about increased asymmetry in the governance arrangements and policy approaches to be developed across localities.
The result is that there is increased potential for city-regional governance and policy arrangements to vary. Yet understanding of the extent and form of this variation is limited. Much of the research to date has focused on individual cities – and much of it has comprised impressionistic attempts to chronicle particular experiences in different places. This article attempts to add empirical detail to the existing literature by addressing these lacunae in two principal ways. First, it reviews circumstances across four English cities, assessing their experiences in relation to the formation of LEPs. Second, it employs social network analysis (SNA) to attempt to begin to systematise the comparison of governance arrangements and actor relationships across different cities. Before considering these issues in more detail, the article begins by: exploring in brief the context underlying efforts to develop sub-national governance, summarising the main lineaments of recent territorial policy for England and explaining the divergent range of policy and institutional outcomes in evidence; and outlining the rationale for the establishment of the LEPs.
Context: Divergence in (city-)regional governance and the advent of Local Enterprise Partnerships
The international upsurge of interest in sub-national governance and policy making reflects four main stimuli. The first relates to longstanding concern, especially in US cities but also in the UK, about jurisdictional and fiscal fragmentation and the need to consolidate governance in order to be able to fund the provision of services in a more stable and sustainable way. Related to this, secondly, has been a desire to develop more meaningful, metropolitan territories that relate more closely to functional geographies and therefore provide a more effective platform on which to base efficient, effective and equitable service provision. Again, this has been a long-established objective of city-regional governance in the UK, and also underpins the more recent ‘new regionalism’ observable in the United States (see, for example, Frisken and Norris, 2002). Third, alongside the goals of jurisdictional consolidation and the creation of scale economies for service delivery, a more recent emphasis in sub-national governance has been upon developing institutional geographies that are better equipped to promote environmental sustainability – for example, by providing a more effective basis on which to plan growth and combat sprawl. These concerns have been prominent, for instance, in the social movement regionalism evident in some US cities and their regions (Pastor et al., 2009).
A fourth factor, of especial significance in explaining the growth of interest in sub-national governance and policy initiatives in the English cities on which this article focuses, has been the desire to develop locally relevant economic development policy. In response, in particular, to evidence to suggest that cities in England, outside the buoyant South East region around London, have experienced sustained, structurally rooted decline extending over many decades (for example, Parkinson et al., 2004), a succession of governments have contributed to the development of an elaborate and increasingly disparate, multi-level geography of institutions and policy initiatives. Initially, after the election of the Blair Government in 1997, attention was trained upon England’s standard administrative regions, with experiments in political regionalism sitting alongside a more expansive and expensive programme of economic regionalism via the establishment of the RDAs. Despite the subsequent unravelling of central government’s regional ‘project’ – first with the abandonment of embryonic political regionalism from 2004, and later with the abolition of the RDAs by the incoming Conservative-led administration from 2010 – broader interest in sub-national governance and local economic development has remained undimmed. The impetus underlying the development of city-regional governance, in particular, has grown, again drawing on arguments that the (re)creation of territorially-based initiatives and institutions can provide a means of helping to induce broader urban economic revival. At the same time, the notion that it is cities that drive national economic growth has been one deployed repeatedly in support of the development of city-regional governance. Thus, there is apparently ‘growing recognition of the pivotal role cities play in modern economies’ (Core Cities Group, 2004: 7); rising awareness that ‘cities drive prosperity’ (Urban Task Force, 2005: 9); an increasing appreciation that ‘cities matter for regional and national economic performance’ (HM Treasury et al., 2006: 17); and a consequent need for local and national policy to ensure that ‘our biggest cities are genuine drivers of economic growth’ (HM Government, 2010: 11).
These arguments have been central to demands for more coherent sub-national governance and economic development policy for English cities and regions. What is especially significant for the purposes of this article, however, is that pressures for enhanced governance and stronger sub-national policy have been expressed in a geographically variable fashion. This reflects a consistent case over many years, articulated by the Core Cities group for example, that innovation in sub-national governance ought to comprise incremental reform rather than wholesale restructuring; developing city-regional governance should mean augmenting existing flows of central government funding and creating on a discretionary basis new institutional configurations and policy interventions (see also LGA, 2006; ODPM, 2006).
The result, as Parr (2005) notes, has been extensive local experimentation around what Parkinson et al. (2004: 75) term ‘city-regional solutions’: voluntaristic city-regional partnerships and networks of local authorities and other institutional actors, the precise form and extent of which vary across cities. But at the same time, consensus about the need to allow local policy elites to determine the form and extent of city-regional governance has also prompted central government to develop mechanisms to facilitate more effective inter-agency and intergovernmental coordination of labour market, planning, housing, transport and economic development functions (NLGN, 2005). This was the principle underlying multi-area agreements (MAAs): inter-district pacts introduced following the 2006 Local Government White Paper to allow constituent local authorities to ‘join-up’ their interventions with each other, and with central government spending departments (Taylor and Wilson, 2006). It was also the principle explaining legislation, enacted in 2009, to permit the establishment of city-regions on a statutory footing, initially through two pilot areas, Manchester and Leeds. A similar desire to formalise city-regional governance and enhance leadership capacity has also provided at least part of the impetus for arguments by successive governments in support of the establishment of directly-elected mayors (Grint and Holt, 2012; Marlow, 2012). Likewise, concern about conferring more meaningful fiscal autonomy to city-regions provided the basis in 2011 for City Deals: central-local agreements about devolution from Whitehall of responsibility and finance for key policy areas like transport infrastructure and housing and regeneration (HM Government, 2011).
The advent of Local Enterprise Partnerships
In these ways, central government has attempted to manage, and begin to bring some order to, diverse sub-national arrangements for the governance of economic development. The Cameron Coalition Government extended this approach from 2010 by encouraging further local policy and institutional experimentation, linked to its wider programme of localism, but within a framework provided by the establishment of a nationwide programme of Local Enterprise Partnerships. The rationale underpinning the LEPs was again based on the notion that sub-national institutional and policy-making capacity had to be bolstered if England’s cities and regions – both prosperous and otherwise – were to contribute more effectively to national economic performance. Like many of the innovations that preceded them, LEPs continue the approach developed over the previous decades of managing economic development through cross-sector partnerships, but with the private sector playing a more prominent role than in the nominally business-led RDAs. In contrast to the supposed dirigisme of the latter, the LEPs are intended to be rooted more in local area priorities. Their geographical delimitation is also intended to be dictated by local specificities, unimpeded by central government decree or the inherited legacy of artificial administrative spaces – the English regions – that bear little relation to the functional realities of the space economy. As a result, some are delimited in novel ways, covering territories that more closely match actual economic geographies or – in some cases – overlap (Valler and Carpenter, 2011). Others, however, are defined rather more conservatively on the basis of existing local authority districts, city-regional boundaries (as in Greater Manchester and Leeds) or current or past county councils (Townsend, 2012).
Just as the geography of the LEPs ranges from conventional and predictable to unusual and imaginative, the composition of boards also varies, in part driven by divergent local political and economic circumstances. Some studies have pointed to the preponderance of state and quasi-state elite actors on LEP boards, with under-representation of business and voluntary sector interests said to contradict the rhetorical emphasis on private sector leadership and the ‘localist’ mobilisation of citizen interest (SQW, 2010). Others have pointed towards a more complex interplay between private and public actors, in which both on occasion are side-lined – but with voluntary actors more consistently marginalised or excluded (Pugalis and Shutt, 2012). The limited representation of voluntary groups might be viewed as surprising, given government’s emphasis on extending involvement in policy making ‘diagonally’ beyond the state and across civil society. Some have argued that the seemingly desultory (and occasionally idiosyncratic) composition of LEP boards renders a number of them non-strategic (Pickard, 2010), with observers frequently noting the risk that they become irrelevant ‘talking shops’ (see, for example, House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2011: 11; Shutt et al., 2012: 15; Thompson et al., 2012: 339).
Board membership, and its variability, might therefore be viewed as an indicator of the differing ways in which, and the uneven ease with which, LEPs have been constructed. This, in turn, reflects variable local inheritances of existing policies and institutions, a multifarious legacy of forms and traditions of inter-agency and cross-sector joint working, and the different admixture of actor interrelationships. Moving beyond initial reviews of the membership of LEP boards, the next section explains the methodological basis of research to examine in more detail the nature and composition of the networks surrounding the LEPs, and to identify contrasts and commonalities as a means of drawing broader conclusions about the governance of urban economic development.
Social network analysis as a means of exploring the governance of urban economic development
This article seeks to add to existing qualitative research on relational aspects of ‘new governance spaces’ like the LEPs by attempting systematically to explore the interrelationships between the different actors involved. In doing so, we employ social network analysis, which provides one means of attempting to quantify actor networks involved in the governance of local economic development. Knox et al (2006) note that despite the network being the defining metaphor for contemporary governance arrangements, there have been few attempts to employ SNA to describe and explain the functioning of those networks. Here, we seek to go beyond the metaphorical and rhetorical use of the network, and attempt to understand the functioning of actually existing networks. The intention is to begin to develop an objective and systematic means of describing governance networks, and to provide a basis on which to triangulate existing and future qualitative exploration of sub-national governance in order to understand the nature of the actor relationships.
This approach can be situated within a sociological tradition exemplified by Granovetter (1973), whose influential work on ‘the strength of weak ties’ explains the importance of individual actor roles within networks (information brokers, bridges, early adopters and boundary spanners), as well as highlighting centrality and peripherality amongst individuals and institutions. Networks, it could be argued, are useful as heuristic tools which expose some of the underlying structural elements informing the views and actions of groupings of governance actors.
The principal limitation of SNA is that in looking at network structures the analyst may be blinded to the wider socio-economic and political forces that condition actor relationships. Equally, there is risk of over-emphasising micro-level aspects of those relationships, and underplaying the degree to which they are influenced by broader structural factors. But as Foley and Edwards (1999) note, even if it is impossible for SNA ever to take full account of the wider socio-economic, cultural or political contexts within which networks operate, as a technique it nevertheless provides a basis on which subsequently to explore in more detail (and underpinned by more reliable data) issues related to the roles and actions of agents, trust, reciprocity and a host of other non-quantifiable characteristics.
Another limitation of SNA concerns the limited degree to which it can shed light on the complexity of actor interrelationships because of the need to identify all members of a network (Gissendanner, 2003: 666). It is this practical difficulty which in the past explained in part why formal sociometry was employed relatively sparingly in analyses of urban governance, but the advent of software such as Pajek and yED has substantially lowered this barrier. Equally, sociometric approaches can be of value even where a sample of actor connections are identified, caveats about their representativeness notwithstanding.
There are some notable exceptions to this general aversion to the use of sociometric approaches in the study of urban governance. John’s (1998) work exploring the roles played by elites in comparative English and French contexts is one example (and is all the more notable since it pre-dates most of the major SNA software). But even allowing for qualifications about the difficulty of quantifying complex actor interrelationships, the technique has value as an indicative tool, providing pointers about the appropriateness of different multi-agency and multi-actor structures for delivering policy. In general, though, SNA remains a technique employed largely within the worlds of quantitative sociology and management science, and infrequently (John excepted) in relation to the governance of urban economic development.
This article therefore seeks to begin to rectify this omission by exploring the nature of the relations between actors, their positionality and the structure of the networks within which they sit (Scott, 2000). In doing so, we draw on Krebs and Holley’s (2002) work, which offers a series of ideal type networks: ‘scattered fragments’, ‘hub and spokes’, ‘small worlds’ and ‘core/periphery’ (represented diagrammatically in Figure 1). For ‘scattered fragment’ configurations (Figure 1a), the individual nodes are quite isolated from one another – there are some small cliques but no connections between them. The ‘hub and spoke’ model (Figure 1b) has a central broker, the introduction of which has the effect of transforming the way in which the nodes are connected. In the ‘small world’ configuration (Figure 1c), brokerage has achieved further integration of nodes into cliques. Krebs and Holley see the final configuration, ‘core/periphery’ (Figure 1d), as optimal in that there are multiple brokers, convening several strands.
Ideal type networks.
City-regional governance structures and the role of LEPs in the core cities.
Note: Emboldened rows denote the selected case study cities.
These different models reflect in part the variable pace at which, and the differential coherence with which, city-regional governance has emerged. Some, like Leeds and Manchester, have been viewed as making significant headway in brokering local agreement about new city-regional initiatives – recognised in their formal designation by central government as pilot statutory city-regions in 2009. Others, like Birmingham, Bristol or Liverpool have more fraught histories, characterised by protracted inter-institutional, cross-sector and inter-area conflicts that have constrained the development of collective structures. And others, like Nottingham/Derby and Newcastle, have pursued geographically more expansive forms of spatial governance, reflecting in the case of the former a relatively more limited recent history of supra-district institution building, and in the latter a desire to promote a number of larger sub-regional territories to succeed the disbanded RDA (Shaw and Robinson, 2012).
Reflecting this diversity, we report in this article on case studies of four of the core cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and Liverpool – in an attempt to cover all three of the categories of governance shown in Table 1, but also to embody a range of political and economic histories. In respect of the latter, the four are intended to represent deep-rooted structural economic decline and hesitant and partial recovery (in the case of Liverpool); problematic experience of economic restructuring, offset by pronounced growth in some sectors and sub-areas (Leeds and Birmingham); and stronger relative urban economic performance allied to localised social distress (Bristol). These crude characterisations conceal a more complex and varied reality; but their purpose is to provide a broadly representative sample of recent historical economic and political circumstances across the core cities.
The SNA used publically available data on the elite level membership and structure of the LEP boards in each of the case study cities. Data relate to the published transitional boards of the case study LEPs at June 2012. Links between actors were inferred on the basis of the geographical location of private sector board members, and actor membership of sub-groups, thematic or policy areas and other structures within the respective LEPs. The SNA is therefore restricted to connections between board members; informal relationships between members, or their connections in arenas beyond the LEPs, are omitted from the analysis. The heuristic approach adopted generates network maps that capture the location of elite actors in each LEP on the basis of formal structures; data constraints mean that informal and non-elite actor interactions outwith the board are excluded, even though in many cases they are important determinants of the shape of local policy. The data on board member geographical origins and their intra-LEP affiliations was first entered into the yED software, after which two additional steps were followed to generate the network maps. First, the Kamada-Kawai (1989) algorithm was applied to determine the level of centrality of each node in the network (identified as boxes in Figures 2–5). The algorithm identifies the shortest distance of each node to the centre of the network, ranging from 1 (completely central in the network) to 0 (completely peripheral). Second, the ‘organic layout’ option available in yED was used to configure the networks; this is particularly useful where multiple actors are involved in configuring the governance architecture of a network. The outcome of the organic layout is the lattice effect of elite level connections represented in the network diagrams documented in the next section of the article, which attempts to interpret actor interrelationships and contextualise them on the basis of review of existing literature on the governance of economic development in each city.
Leeds city region LEP institutional geography and board member network. West of England LEP institutional geography and board member network. Mersey Partnership LEP institutional geography and board member network. Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP institutional geography and board member network.
LEP actor networks and the governance of urban economic development
LEP actor networks for the four case study city-regions are shown in Figures 2–5. Nodes shown in each figure denote individual actors (in this case, board members) and the edges relate to the formal, stated connections between them. The measure of centrality is recorded in the grey boxes alongside the arrows that connect each node. The four LEP networks can be related to the ideal types identified by Krebs and Holley (2002) (Figure 1). None of the four case study networks by definition conform to the ‘scattered fragments’ type since the introduction of a LEP automatically introduces links amongst some of the different actors; neither do any of the four accord to the ‘core and periphery’ category, the most integrated of the types and the one to which it would be expected that all the LEPs ultimately might aspire. Of the two remaining ideal types, Birmingham most closely resembles the ‘hub and spoke’ archetype (Figure 1b), but Leeds, Bristol and Liverpool to varying extents correspond to the more fully developed ‘small worlds’ category (Figure 1c). Of the three LEPs in the latter category, actor networks in Leeds and Bristol appear to be the most cohesive. The remainder of this section goes on to explore the network structures for each of the cities in turn.
Leeds: Towards cohesion from ‘small worlds’
In the case of Leeds, greater integration amongst the array of associated governance actors is perhaps unsurprising given the sustained emphasis on constructing pan-district city-regional governance over many years, culminating in the decision as part of the City Deal agreed with government in 2012 to establish a combined authority for West Yorkshire. At the same time, the relatively high level of interconnectivity amongst actors may also reflect the core city’s generous local authority boundaries and the resultant inclusion over many years of actors from satellite towns within formally established local government structures.
On the other hand, the extension of the Leeds LEP to include not only the four neighbouring authorities which comprised the former West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council, but also a further five districts extending into North and (in the case of Barnsley) South Yorkshire may explain a network that contains a number of ‘peripheral players’ and might be more integrated were the LEP’s boundaries to be more narrowly drawn. Whereas an institutional geography based on the five West Yorkshire districts would have allowed cohesion linked to longstanding efforts to cultivate collective political voice and joint policy-making and service-delivery capacity in the former metropolitan county area, the more expansive delimitation of the LEP means there is a functionally polycentric structure that could make inter-area connections more difficult to realise. That the Leeds LEP shares four of its constituent areas – Barnsley, York, Craven and Selby – with the neighbouring LEPs adds a further challenge to the process of developing internal cohesion.
This is reflected in a network structure, shown in Figure 2, in which there appears to be a division between the core of actors linked to a bi-nodal Leeds-Bradford hub at the heart of the former West Yorkshire County Council and the current Combined Authority, and a wider penumbra of board members with weaker connections to this metropolitan core. This structure is in line with an earlier exploratory process of consensus building around a definition of the city-region that remained consciously flexible, with ‘fuzzy’ boundaries designed to enable the area’s geography to be determined cautiously, elementally and with reference to local sensitivities (Haughton and Counsell, 2007). A gradualist philosophy of incremental accretion is also reflected in the decision to establish the combined authority initially around the five West Yorkshire authorities, but ultimately to seek to extend its boundaries – perhaps to the entire LEP area (Leeds City Region, 2012: 25).
Bristol: From friction to fusion in city-regional relationships?
Whereas the relative cohesion evident in Leeds’s network is not unexpected, the interconnected nature of Bristol suggested by Figure 3 is perhaps more surprising given the long history of inter-sector and inter-area schisms that characterise its politics (see, for example, Bassett, 1996). Building intergovernmental links in the context of a highly fragmented institutional geography has long presented a problem for a series of incipient city-regional initiatives (see, for example, Boddy et al., 2004). The spasmodic and partial nature of collaboration between Bristol – the network hub, denoted by a value of 1 (Figure 3) – and its neighbouring authorities may reflect in part the relative strength of the city’s economy. This provides a point of contrast to other provincial cities, where reversing and/or managing economic decline has constituted a powerful incentive for collaborative behaviour and proactive attempts to build inter-area capacity (Boddy, 2003: 31).
Yet earlier difficulties in constructing supra-district governance spaces, it might be inferred, are reflected to only a limited degree in a network pattern that is more integrated than might be expected. Part of the explanation for this could centre on the geography of the LEP which, unlike Leeds’s, relates to a pre-existing institution in that it extends across the four unitary authorities that until 1996 comprised the lower tier within the former Avon County Council. Indeed, as Farthing (2008) notes, some degree of joint inter-district working continued on strategic planning for CUBA (the ‘County that Used to Be Avon’) in the late 1990s, before these were later formalised and extended as part of the Regional Spatial Strategy for the South West. Equally, as Boddy and Hickman (2012) point out, the need to accommodate growth pressures has long acted as a stimulus for territorial cooperation, particularly in respect of infrastructure planning and the need to lure additional transport resources from Whitehall. Indeed, the City Deal brokered by the city-region in 2012 recognised the need to relieve what have long been acknowledged as growth pressures (see, for example, Tallon, 2007). The City Deal is structured around retention of any future growth in local business taxes to support major investment in public transport, as well as other perceived blockages on growth, including investment in assembling developable land and in offsetting local skills shortages.
Liverpool: From conflict to cohesion in metropolitan governance?
To an even greater extent than Bristol, Liverpool’s recent political history has been marked by internecine conflict in what might be expected to have been a strong local Labour party, coupled with a consequent absence of stable party political control of the City Council. At the same time – and perhaps reflecting political instability that contrasted with most of its peers – attempts to construct inter-district links and city-regional governance more generally in the years following the disbandment of the five-district Merseyside County Council in 1986 have had a low profile. While its trans-Pennine counterparts Manchester and, to a lesser extent, Leeds have been regularly lauded by central government for their pioneering attempts to develop new forms of city-region-based governance, Liverpool and surrounding Merseyside have received few plaudits. This is in spite a major programme of structural fund investment via the EU Objective 1 status conferred on the conurbation from 1994–2006, and which required some degree of inter-district joint working, notably on transport infrastructure. It is also in spite of other, more modest initiatives which involved inter-authority links (such as Housing Market Renewal from 2002–2011, covering parts of three of the five authorities) or a variety of public-private partnership efforts to reverse negative stereotypes and boost the area’s attractiveness to prospective investors, visitors and residents (notably the original Mersey Partnership, before it was merged with, and its title assumed by, the LEP). And the relatively slow pace with which city-region governance has evolved in Liverpool is also in spite (or perhaps because of) the existence, uniquely for any British city, of a separate regional Government Office for Merseyside from 1993–1998 – itself a legacy of the special treatment the city received in the wake of civil unrest in 1981, when the Merseyside Task Force was established as a conduit to central government (Crouch, 2003). This meant that Liverpool, despite the abolition of the metropolitan County Council for Merseyside in 1986, was alone amongst English cities in having a formal government body covering its city-region from 1981 until 1998.
Alliances formed via these earlier efforts may provide part of the explanation for levels of interconnectivity in the LEP actor network derived for Liverpool (see Figure 4). So too might more recent efforts to advance city-regional governance, as the city’s history of oppositional politics has subsided and as local policy actors have begun to buy-into orthodox ideas about the need to foster political and institutional equilibrium in order to underpin enhanced economic prosperity. This is reflected in a relatively integrated network in which Liverpool City Council assumes the hub role (with a value of 1 in Figure 4). Liverpool’s centrality to the Mersey Partnership LEP is significant in view of arguments that city-region governance ought to develop around a strong central hub. Part of the case informing the establishment of an elected mayor for Liverpool in 2012 related to ideas about the need for leadership to catalyse inter-agency and cross-sector cooperation, but without undergoing what was perceived as the politically unpopular and administratively disruptive process of restoring formal metropolitan government, or of establishing the mayoralty on a city-region basis (McDonough, 2011).
Birmingham: ‘Ugly and problematic’ geographies and a hub-and-spoke network
Birmingham’s network stands in contrast to the other three city-regions in that it most closely resembles the hub-and-spokes archetype (Figure 5). To those unversed in the intricacies of the city(-region)’s recent political history, this may seem surprising given that Birmingham has in the past been identified by governments as a potential test bed in which to experiment with new forms of city-region based governance, initially as a City Pride area in the mid-1990s and then as a prospective pilot for more formalised metropolitan governance in 2006. It might also be seen as surprising given past suggestions that the city was well-placed amongst England’s major urban areas to be a ‘trailblazer’ for the introduction of a city-regional mayoralty (Marshall and Finch, 2006). Yet this conceals an array of past difficulties which explain in part the relatively amorphous nature of the LEP actor network. Efforts to (re)build metropolitan governance in Birmingham, over several years, have been repeatedly frustrated by inter-agency friction and related volatility in local political control. This is illustrated, for example, by delays in publishing a City Pride prospectus in the mid-1990s or in agreeing a city-region development plan a decade later, both of which resulted in central government intervention to try to broker conciliation amongst discordant local actors (see, for example, Ward, 2003). It is also reflected in the launch, in 2013, of the Greater Birmingham project, involving a supervisory board of nine local authority leaders intended to oversee the private sector-led LEP, which in turn was identified as the vehicle for organising Single Pot resources and other funds devolved from government to help implement an agreed local growth strategy (GBSLEP, 2013). But even this most recent structure is based on what one commentator has described as an ‘ugly and problematic’ geography that excludes the neighbouring Black Country and Coventry and Warwickshire authorities which form part of the adjoining LEPs (Scott, 2013).
A number of factors explain the city-region’s apparently more inchoate network, following on from these earlier frustrations in developing supra-district governance. One relates to the dominance of Birmingham within the former West Midlands County Council. Whereas Liverpool accounts for 34% of the population of the five districts in the former Merseyside metropolitan county, Birmingham’s one million residents comprise 39% of the total across a larger collection of seven West Midlands authorities – perhaps providing less of an incentive to build alliances with neighbouring areas than is the case for the more parsimoniously delimited Liverpool (Murie et al., 2003). Whereas Liverpool is 46% larger than the next most populous of the five Merseyside districts, Birmingham is almost two-and-half times bigger than the second largest West Midlands metropolitan authority. As Bentley et al. (2010) note, concern amongst many of the authorities in the former West Midlands county about Birmingham’s ascendancy have proved a persistent check on efforts to build metropolitan solidarity.
Another factor potentially explaining the relative lack of political and institutional cohesion in Birmingham’s city-region relates to its functionally polycentric economic, political and socio-cultural geography, the result of which is perhaps unavoidably reflected in the more disparate pattern of actor interrelationships shown in Figure 5. It is also reflected, moreover, in the preponderance of West Midlands local authorities amongst the 38 nationally that form part of more than one LEP (Pugalis and Shutt, 2012: 24). As Bolton and Coupar (2011: 2–3) note, the Birmingham city-region is bisected by some six different LEPs, suggesting that ‘local politics have prevented the city from establishing a LEP at the optimum scale to influence its growth prospects’. Bentley et al. (2010) describe a conflict-ridden process of agreeing LEP boundaries in the West Midlands region, with initial proposals for a region-wide LEP quickly jettisoned as long-standing local rivalries began to inform a series of alternative institutional geometries. The result, arguably, is that the West Midlands region more than any other substantiates the criticism that the LEP programme is characterised by ‘incoherent and incomplete geographies’ (Danson and Lloyd, 2012: 89).
The depth and extent of these inter-regional fissures reinforce arguments about the kind of network governance structure that might be appropriate for the Birmingham city-region. A hub-and-spoke arrangement for the existing Birmingham LEP, with a central coordinating point for a surrounding series of semi-autonomous networks, may be more appropriate for an intrinsically polycentric area than would be a more tightly-knit (but artificial) core-periphery structure of the kind to which LEPs might be expected ultimately to aspire. There is an obvious danger in imposing the latter type of structure on an area whose economic and socio-cultural functionality is based on multiple nodes, rather than allowing looser forms of governance to emerge more organically. This, it might be argued, is in line with the spirit underlying government’s localist agenda; but the countervailing pressure for LEPs of comparable size, and the inevitable temptation for new institutions to accrue status and subordinate constituent rivals, may mean that the longer-term viability of a hub-and-spoke arrangement is in doubt.
Conclusion: LEPs and the governance of urban economic development
The partial autonomy afforded to LEPs is driven by a discourse which stresses central government’s desire to liberate local actors and allow them to chart a future course unfettered by Whitehall interference. This article has documented research to explore the degree to which this rhetorical desire has any basis in empirical reality. It has explored, in particular, the interrelationships between LEP board members and how they might be interpreted in the context of wider city-regional governance arrangements across four case study cities. From this, we can draw three principal conclusions.
The first is that social network analysis suggests some degree of variability in the web of actor interactions across the sample of LEPs. This could have important implications for the future performance of individual LEPs, but in broader terms could also affect the ability of cities to nurture governance capacity and develop policy. This is important because central government assumes that local institutional structures and policy initiatives will evolve organically and without the injection of significant additional resources. Whatever caveats one might apply to the complex relationship between effective governance and economic wellbeing, existing political capital – including the cohesion of actor networks – could therefore be an important determinant of urban economic performance. Nevertheless, the LEP experience reinforces the possibility that for some cities – like Leeds – a process over several decades of building city-regional governance gives a potentially important advantage over peers with broadly comparable economic contexts but more marked recent histories of administrative fragmentation and institutional friction (like Birmingham).
A second set of conclusions centre on the study of governance, and the need to gain a better understanding of how constellations of actors form in different ways, reflecting variables like the nature of central government involvement, the extent of external funding, the strength of local economies and the inherited legacy of governance structures. Apparent changes to the organisation of the state as a territorial entity have prompted sustained interest over more than a decade. However, as Peck (2003: 223) notes, the complex and uneven nature of this process means that it is important to add empirical weight to the many conceptually driven attempts to interpret the rescaling of governance. To date, most of the effort to document empirical experience has comprised qualitative forays into individual case study cities or regions. While valuable, it is important that these are complemented by other techniques to attempt to understand local governance and, specifically, the way in which different actors relate to each other in a context of apparently dispersed power and institutional fragmentation.
The final concluding observations relate to the extent to which, in a context in which ideas about localism are said to inform spatial policy decision making, central government is willing to tolerate disparity across LEPs. Variable LEP board networks suggest uneven levels of capacity that could impact on the efficacy of policy and ultimately the wellbeing of local economies. In this sense, they betray an ideological commitment to liberal, hands-off policy making and a concomitant rejection of old-style formal, uniform, systematic and centrally driven approaches exemplified by a pre-existing performance management regime in which centrally imposed target outputs loomed large. The reality, though, is a more complex one, at odds with localist rhetoric in many respects (Deas, 2013). There is a very clear tension between the rhetorically permissive standpoint underlying the LEPs’ establishment, and the practical need, for political reasons, for central government to retain control and scrutiny. Indeed, government’s insistence from the outset that LEP coverage be nationwide could be seen as a rejection of localism in its purest form, allowing new structures to emerge spontaneously. LEPs may be able to operate within an environment characterised by lighter touch regulation than was the case for their predecessors, but evidence of central direction abounds. It has extended to disquiet about the inception of individual LEPs, their geography and mixture of constituent participants. It has also involved Whitehall-driven attempts to exert control over the direction of policy, notably through allocations of Growing Places Fund resources, the award of which is determined by central government judgements about the degree to which LEPs are embarking on appropriately growth-focused strategies. These provide evidence of the recurring tension between local discretion and central scrutiny. As one government minister, speaking in the context of secondary education, put it: ‘…if you get the targets wrong you can end up with incentives which are not the right ones, but if you have no targets at all you can also end up without a level of service that is good for the public’ (Laws, 2013).
What marks the localism agenda as different, however, is that the decentralisation which it represents is one that to some extent tolerates – and even celebrates – inter-area competition, viewed not as a deleterious zero-sum-game but as a force for resourcefulness and innovation in local policy. That the Localism Act 2011 opted not to extend a duty of cooperation beyond local authorities and to include LEPs is symptomatic of this acceptance of inter-area competition as an intrinsic part of post-regional local economic development policy.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.