Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

After a decade of devolution and amid uncertainties about its effects, it is timely to assess and reflect upon the evidence and enduring meaning of any ‘economic dividend’ of devolution in the UK. Taking an institutionalist and quantitative approach, we seek to discern the nature and extent of any economic dividend through a conceptual and empirical analysis of the relationships between spatial disparities, spatial economic policy, and decentralisation. Situating the UK experience within its evolving historical context, we find: (i) a varied and uneven nature of the relationships between regional disparities, spatial economic policy, and decentralisation that change direction during specific time periods; (ii) the role of national economic growth is pivotal in explaining spatial disparities and the nature and extent of their relationship with the particular forms of spatial economic policy and decentralisation deployed; and, (iii) there is limited evidence that any economic dividend of devolution has emerged, but this remains difficult to discern because its likely effects are overridden by the role of national economic growth in decisively shaping the pattern of spatial disparities and in determining the scope and effects of spatial economic policy and decentralisation.

This paper is concerned with the implications of state territorial decentralization for the management of uneven regional development and spatial justice. It is argued that accounts of post-1997 UK devolution and the treatment of ‘the English question’ with a similar concern have tended to dismiss government policies against the backdrop of an uncritical view of spatial Keynesianism. Furthermore, these accounts have not succeeded in capturing the interconnectedness of the issues of democracy, solidarity, and spatial justice. In order to address these shortcomings I elaborate on a perspective that draws on insights of postfoundational political thought and interprets justice as democratic practice. This perspective reminds us that any notion of solidarity between people sharing a ‘national space’ and, consequently, any understanding of spatial justice is always politically constructed. Accordingly, the main task becomes to ‘unimagine’ the nation as a community of pregiven interests and to examine the obstacles to a meaningful debate on the institutional supports of solidarity.

The reintroduction of devolution in Northern Ireland is widely interpreted as the working out of the Belfast Agreement (1998) which aimed to embed political consensus in shared institutions of the state. However, such analysis tends to be limited with regard to wider political economy readings of the devolution project and historic struggles to find an appropriate institutional fix to manage different forms of crisis. Peace and stability have, it is argued, permitted Northern Ireland's reentry to global markets and circuits of capital with new governance structures being assembled to reconfigure ‘post-conflict’ economic space. We argue that the onset of devolution has promoted a mix between ethnosectarian resource competition and a constantly expanding neoliberal model of governance. Devolved neoliberal structures that sustain social polarisation may perpetuate strategies of resistance that could cut across and challenge ethnosectarian politics and deepening social segregation.

Devolved government in Scotland actively reconstitutes the unequal conditions of social class reproduction. Recognition of state-led class reconstitution draws upon the social theory of Bourdieu. Our analysis of social class in devolved Scotland revisits theories that examine the state as a ‘power container’. A range of state-enabling powers regulate the legal, economic, social, and cultural containers of class relations as specific forms of what Bourdieu called economic, social, and cultural ‘capital’. The preconditions of class reproduction are structured in direct ways by the Scottish state as a wealth container but also, more indirectly, as a cultural container and a social container. Competitive nationalism in the devolved Scottish state enacts neoliberal policies as a class-specific worldview but, at the same time, discursively frames society as a panclass national fraternity in terms of distinctive Scottish values of welfare nationalism. Nationalism is able to express this ambiguity in symbolic ways in which the partisan language of social class cannot.

Prior to devolution, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each had their own autonomous development organisations to undertake and promote regional economic planning and development within their respective territories. These operated within a national UK regional policy framework. An expectation of devolution was that the development organisations would continue to evolve in different ways according to the prevailing and anticipated economic conditions and differentiated needs and priorities of the regional economies. Indeed, the model was further extended. In England, for example, regional development agencies were established as an integral part of the new intended Regional Assembly infrastructure—providing important economic development delivery functions to the new political bodies. In general terms, a more effective integration of planning, infrastructure provision, business development and investment, and economic development was anticipated at the regional level. This was held as an effective means of contributing to national economic growth and competitiveness objectives: themselves key and pivotal rationales for political devolution. On the basis of benchmarking exercises and academic and policy literature we review and analyse the significant changes that have taken place in the institutions which have been generated across the UK since the late 1990s, presenting and contrasting each nation's and region's experiences with an appreciation of their specific powers and resources.

Despite a growing academic scepticism about the significance of territory as a driver of politics, it remains a stubborn presence in the practice of politics. In the context of the wider UK devolution agenda the first decade of this century saw the emergence of an English regionalist project, based around a series of regional institutions and governance networks. In other words, it appeared that a new framework for subnational territorial politics was being constructed. With the help of a case study of the South East of England, I explore the fragility of the project in practice but also note the continuing importance of territory as a focus of politics, highlighting the importance of recognising that territory is not to be taken as something given, somehow preexisting and waiting to be filled with politics, but rather as something that is actively formed and shaped through the political process.

With this paper I consider the role of diffuse nonstate and subnational actors working together in networks in Indian climate politics. The Indian government has maintained several core principles in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations since the emergence of climate change as a major international issue, and until recently the engagement of nonstate and subnational actors has been limited. However, new networked political actors are emerging that are widely linked into transnational networks, often supported by external funding and bringing new, diverse organisations into the debate. I argue that to understand their role and significance we must be more attentive to the spatiality of the policy process and must reconceptualise the relationship between nonstate actors and the state. The international arena is not the only area of climate politics, or necessarily the most significant, and attention to the role of local politics could develop a more rooted understanding of Indian climate politics.

There are growing academic and policy interests in the factors that underpin the formation and growth of clusters, especially in such ‘hyped-up’ scientific and technological fields as the nano-technologies. With this paper we analyzes the determinants of scientific cluster growth (measured by the number of publications emanating from them), distinguishing between structural effects (ie, initial cluster size, scientific field composition, and geographic location), on the one hand and scientific variety, organizational diversity, and degree of openness (in terms of collaboration with outside actors), on the other. Overall, scientific variety enhances cluster growth, but organizational diversity, slows it down. However, patterns of growth are different in Asia, Europe, and North America, and it seems that cluster evolution is highly contingent on national systems of innovation and on the history of collaboration amongst local actors. Policy makers and cluster strategists must design specific policies according to location and should not simply attempt to replicate best practices from one zone to another. Slow growth may also reflect ‘elitist’ strategies—those based on quality rather than on numbers.

For forty years area-based initiatives (ABIs) were the primary tool used by UK governments to tackle problems of concentrated deprivation and dereliction. The last decade saw these initiatives end, replaced by new forms of city-wide or region-wide governance: Local Strategic Partnerships in England and Community Planning Partnerships in Scotland. It was argued in both policy documents and policy analysis that this change would deliver more effective regeneration for all communities. Challenging this narrative, I present this policy shift as a change in the meaning of regeneration policy using the methodology of interpretive policy analysis. The evidence from Scottish experience suggests that for a key policy actor—community activists in deprived neighbourhoods—the approach of ABIs had a great deal of meaning as regeneration. Furthermore, this meaning was still present a decade after an ABI had ended. Meanwhile, the newer strategic partnerships were delivering little meaningful change. This difference in meaning is used to reimagine strategic regeneration as a more positive process.

Emerging in recent research on sociotechnical transitions towards a low-carbon economy is the question of the extent to which such transitions require centralised, intentional coordination by government. Drawing from Hayek's conceptualisation of coordination, I evaluate the effectiveness of policy for low-carbon and zero-carbon homes in England. A detailed analysis is presented of how policy makers address complex choices and trade-offs as well as significant uncertainty. Particular attention is given to those policy decisions which are widely agreed by stakeholders to cause distortive effects. The focus here on the impacts of policy definition and delivery in terms of multiple evaluative criteria can complement and enrich the more process-orientated cross-sector and multilevel analyses that predominate in existing research on policy coordination. Furthermore, the coordination problems identified yield further insights into the actual and potential effectiveness of policy processes in shaping complex sociotechnical transitions.