Transforming sub-national economic governance in England : from competitive regions to competitive city-regions

This doctoral study is situated within key debates concerned with how new urban and regional spaces are being produced in globalisation. Emphasising the weaknesses of 'orthodox' techno-economic interpretations of the 'rise of the region', the state space approach conceives the emergence of new regional governance spaces as the result of political processes in which the state plays a key role (Brenner, 2004). While this framework highlights the role of existent scalar/institutional arrangements (and their political orientations) in channelling and delimiting political economic change, it also raises crucial questions on the role of agency. There is the need for a more developed understanding of issues of political agency and struggle in particular in relation to the shaping of particular regional governance spaces. This study explores the rescaling of economic governance in England from the early to the mid-2000s through a process of 'central orchestrated regionalisation' involving the creation of new regional and city-regional institutions and supports shaped by tensions between national political objectives and regional and local interests. In particular it considers the establishment and development of these frameworks in the context of a particular region, the Yorkshire and the Humber.The PhD contributes to contemporary research on new regional governance spaces in two key ways. Firstly, it develops an enriched formulation of the state space through the engagement with the complementary notions of a 'politics of scale' (Cox, 1998) and regional 'armatures' (Liepietz, 1994). The value of this reformulation is in its capacity to inspire a type of multi-dimensional and multi-scalar regional research through which empirically rich, theoretically driven accounts of regional (trans-)formation can be developed in order to advance knowledge of state space. Secondly, it provides a more nuanced account of the formation of new geographies of governance in the interplay between inherited and emergent arrangements where the tensions that emerge in this process pertain only in part to the difficulties in absorbing extant local institutional circumstances in the trajectory of emergent state initiatives. Crucially, different governance actors, at different spatial scales, frame these problems in different ways as they attempt to calibrate governance arrangements that can assist them in better pursuing their interests.