Abstract
The paper considers the notion that innovation in territorial governance is associated with a set of core neoliberal ideas about local economic development which have come to constitute a new and pervasive consensus. Through a case study of attempts to construct city-regional institutions in Manchester, England, over a period of 25 years, it attempts to track the themes that have underpinned the development of a local politics of economic development. The paper considers the extent to which evolution of city-regional institutions and policy accord to wider ideas about post-political forms of governance and the erosion of democracy in cities. It concludes by considering the degree to which this experience is representative of a wider orthodoxy in the governance of local economic development.
Keywords
Background: Regions, city-regions and the search for subnational territorial governance solutions in England
England’s provincial cities and regions have been subject to a variety of experimental attempts to devise new arrangements for subnational territorial governance and local economic development policy-making. A succession of initiatives based initially on the English administrative regions, and more recently on city-regional territories covering metropolitan areas, have featured on the agendas of successive British governments (see, for example, Harrison, 2012; Pike and Tomaney, 2009). Devising more effective territorial governance arrangements has, in part, been a response to a welter of evidence suggesting cities and regions outside the buoyant southeast region around London have experienced sustained, structurally rooted decline extending over many decades. The impetus underlying city-regional governance has been fuelled by arguments that long-term urban economic decline should be reversed in order that provincial cities can begin to drive national economic growth (for example, Core Cities Group, 2004; HM Government, 2011; HM Treasury et al., 2006).
Such arguments are said to have particular potency because England, unlike France (with Toulouse or Lyon) or Germany (with Munich or Stuttgart), lacks major provincial urban centres that can compete in the global economy with established world cities. With London regaining metropolitan government through the establishment of the Greater London Authority in 2000, the case began to grow for instituting more coherent forms of city-regional governance for England’s major cities. These arguments were central to the agenda of the Core Cities Group, established in the mid-1990s to represent the local authorities of eight of England’s principal provincial cities, and which has played a critical role in subsequent years in encouraging government to introduce a series of new institutions and policy initiatives. These include innovations under the Blair and Brown Labour governments, such as multi-area agreements (MAAs) to encourage cross-boundary subregional cooperation on service delivery (Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG), 2006), and the establishment from 2009 of pilot statutory city-regions to begin to formalise new and existing collaborative intergovernmental institutions in selected areas. Subsequent initiatives under the Cameron coalition government elected in 2010 include: the establishment of business-led Local Enterprise Partnerships to promote local economic development across functional economic areas (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), 2010); the advent of central-local City Deals to finance local transport, labour market and economic development initiatives that complement the centre’s growth agenda (HM Government, 2011); and (inherited from the previous administration) the inception of city-regional combined authorities to pool local government resources and responsibilities and assume from central government a range of delegated transport, economic development and regeneration functions (CLG, 2010).
There have, then, been a series of efforts to facilitate the gradual development of city-regional governance in England, resulting in an elaborate, multilevel geography of institutions and policy initiatives (Harrison, 2012; Pike and Tomaney, 2009). At the same time, underlying these innovations has been longstanding academic interest in interpreting the emergence of what, to some commentators, is a new form of territorial policy and politics, dominated by a set of core neoliberal ideas about local economic development which are said to constitute a new and pervasive orthodoxy that stands in marked contrast to the redistributive politics characteristic of many past variants of regional policy. To some, shifts in the substance of policy are indicative of a wider transformation in urban politics, as the governance of cities and their regions has been redefined as essentially a post-political, value-free managerial exercise, with decision-making the province of a narrow group of elite stakeholders – responsible partners – and oppositional, popular voices excluded (Swyngedouw, 2010a). This has been interpreted by some as an urban politics devoid of the political: where governance is cleansed of the contaminating influence of dispute and dissensus, and redefined as a purely managerial undertaking in which the range of policy possibilities is increasingly constricted (see, for example, MacLeod, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2011).
It is on the nature of the politics underlying city-regional governance and policy that this paper focuses. A sequence of often faltering and fleeting policy initiatives and institutional structures has been accompanied, until recently, by protracted conflict amongst elite actors about the shape of city-regional governance – but also, the paper argues, by the emergence of a clear consensus about the nature and purpose of local economic development policy. This contention is explored via a case study of Manchester – a city viewed by central government as having made exemplary progress in developing a voluntaristic model of flexible city-regional governance on which other cities can draw (Greasley et al., 2011: 1838; Lyons, 2007: 148, 188; Morris and Williams, 2008: 11), and identified by a number of reports as a potential test-bed to pilot various modes of formalised city-regional governance (see, for example, Emmerich and Frankal, 2009; Leadbetter, 2009; Marshall and Finch, 2006; Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), 2006). Assessment of Manchester’s experience is informed by data from a programme of 20 semi-structured interviews undertaken in 2012–2013 with leading local policy actors involved in the development of the major territorial governance innovations in northwest England. Drawing upon these data, the remainder of the paper, first, explores the particular ways in which changes to national policy in England on cities and regions have been translated and applied in terms of local institutional structures; and second, assesses the changing substance of city-regional governance policy, reviewing its evolution and considering the extent to which the development of a local politics of economic development accords to wider ideas about post-political forms of governance. The paper concludes by considering the degree to which this experience sheds further light on ideas about the emergence of post-political orthodoxy in the governance of local economic development.
Inventing and reinventing territorial governance: Manchester as metropolis, regionally embedded city and city-region
Metropolitan government in Manchester, in its original incarnation, existed only fleetingly, from the establishment of Greater Manchester County Council (GMC) in 1974 to its disbandment in 1986. But although the lifespan of Manchester’s first metropolitan authority was brief, its existence reflected a much longer history of attempts to construct city-regional institutions and policy initiatives, dating back as far as 1926 and efforts by the Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee to develop a first metropolitan plan (Williams, 2002: 112). These efforts have continued in the aftermath of the GMC’s abolition, as local policy actors have embarked upon a lengthy sequence of experiments in collaborative metropolitan governance, which only latterly have begun to acquire any kind of maturity or stability.
They began in the late 1980s with initial efforts, almost entirely within the confines of elected local government, to develop formalised intergovernmental mechanisms at the metropolitan scale through which to continue to deliver some of the joint services that were previously the responsibility of the GMC (see Barlow, 1995, and Hebbert and Deas, 2000, for detailed accounts). The rationale was concern about institutional balkanisation and the absence of coherent structures which extended across the functional city and/or its wider city-region. Manchester’s ‘primary urban area’ (an approximation of its economic footprint) has been estimated at 1,592,919, in comparison with a population in 2011 of 503,127 for the core Manchester City Council (Experian, 2011). Efforts to delimit the functional city-region have consistently demonstrated the degree to which the core city authority is under-bounded, whether the city’s catchment is measured in terms of its de facto labour market, travel-to-consume patterns for a variety of services, or patterns of popular cultural identity and Mancunian consciousness (see, for example, Robson et al., 2006). This has prompted enduring concern about the consequent difficulties for effective policy-making – especially in relation to issues that transcend unitary local authority boundaries, such as strategic land-use planning, waste management, economic development and infrastructure provision. These concerns have been accentuated by a growing sense that under-bounding has left Manchester, as with other British cities, at a disadvantage in trying to develop policy aimed at reviving its economic fortunes – a lasting concern exacerbated still further in recent years by received wisdom about the need for cities to compete with each other.
Organic, informal cooperation and the construction of soft institutions
Efforts over successive decades to construct city-regional institutions and develop policy have reiterated the desire of local policy elites to redress the city-region’s fractured politico-institutional geography and rebuild collective policy-making capacity. Table 1 provides a distillation of the complex phased sequence of formal and informal policy and institutional innovations, their definitional characteristics, local and national political underpinnings and geographical imprint. From the early 1990s there has been a succession of organic efforts to develop different forms of territorial governance for Manchester, superimposed on the existing residue of low-profile joint initiatives that emerged with the establishment of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) following the abolition of the GMC in 1986.
The phased evolution of city-regional governance in Manchester.
Phases should not be viewed as discrete – hence the overlap in the years.
The first significant innovation was the launch in 1994 of City Pride, a short-lived initiative driven in part by managerial questions around the coordination of different competitively allocated urban regeneration initiatives, but also, more significantly, by a view that if the economy of Manchester was genuinely to be revitalised in the apparent context of heightened international inter-urban competition, strategic policy-making capacity would need to extend across a number of the unitary district authorities of Greater Manchester and embrace a range of interests in the private and voluntary sectors, and amongst the city’s burgeoning quangocracy (Harding, 1999). As a result, the City Pride partnership involved a variety of public- and private-sector bodies, led by local authorities but also including a representative business organisation and an array of other government agencies. At its core were the agencies and actors from public and private sectors that in the early 1990s had formed the basis for the coalition which tried unsuccessfully to lure the Olympic games to the city (Cochrane et al., 1996). The initiative’s initial boundaries extended beyond Manchester City Council to include the inner areas of the neighbouring districts, giving a population approaching 1 million – meaningful in terms of the functional local labour market while also symbolising the city’s international ambition and standing. Two prospectuses produced in 1994 and 1998 set out a pro-growth agenda for the city-region’s development over a ten year time span, with the aim that Manchester would become a ‘European regional capital, a centre for investment growth, an international city of outstanding commercial, cultural and creative potential’ (Manchester City Council, 1994: 5). By the late 1990s, the momentum underlying the initiative had begun to dissolve in the wake of the election of the Blair government. For the most part, the documents produced under the City Pride aegis deliberately side-stepped sensitivities around controversial issues, such as the distribution of inward investment across the constituent districts or the location of out-of-town retailing, in order to preserve the integrity of what at the time was a disparate coalition of parochial and sectoral interests. Nevertheless, City Pride had some lasting significance in terms of the city-region-based geography it offered for pursuing strategic economic development policy.
This initial experience of developing a metropolitan growth coalition informed the response of the city’s policy elites to the agenda for city-regional governance emerging in the subsequent period. In the years immediately after the election of the Blair government in 1997 – and particularly after the impetus underlying government’s political regionalism programme began to dissipate following the failure to establish elected regional assemblies in 2004 – support gathered for stronger city-regional governance amongst the city’s leading policy actors. This was founded on three factors. First, within Manchester City Council in particular, there was long-established scepticism about the benefits of formal, elected government at the larger scale of England’s polycentric administrative regions (Deas and Ward, 2000). Second, support for stronger city-regional governance amongst the city’s policy elites also stemmed from a pragmatic desire to build institutional capacity and political capital in order to garner extra resources – for transport, urban regeneration and local economic development – from central government. And third, in a context of highly fragmented governance and the proliferation of quasi-state agencies, the development of city-regional institutions was viewed as important as a means of agreeing shared policy for issues of pan-district significance, such as the development of transport infrastructure or the marketing of large sites for foreign direct investment.
These stimuli were evident in a range of subsequent city-region-based structures and policy initiatives. The first was the Manchester Knowledge Capital (M:KC) initiative, launched in 2002. Bearing the imprimatur of both the City Council and the former North West Development Agency (NWDA), the Knowledge Capital partnership was a characteristically broad ranging but loose coalition which also included city-regional actors such as its existing inward investment promotional body, the area’s four (and later three) universities, four of the ten GMC local authorities, and existing inter-agency umbrella bodies established to coordinate the delivery of neighbourhood renewal, healthcare and skills training. It also included Manchester Enterprises, an agency that was to play a pivotal role in coordinating economic development policy for the city-region over the subsequent decade and beyond.
M:KC articulated an optimistic narrative of the city-region as a key international actor, combining ‘the enhanced economic competitiveness of Helsinki with the urban renaissance of Barcelona to create a truly world class city…’ (Manchester City Council/Knowledge Capital Partnership, 2003: 2). The central aim was one of stimulating further economic growth by promoting the Manchester city-region as a centre of ‘learning’ and ‘innovation’ – a fundamental transformation of the city’s economic base, as the Work Foundation described it, from ‘cottonopolis’ to ‘ideopolis’ (Jones, 2006). This would mean extending and enhancing the range of ‘assets’ – higher education, transport infrastructure, architecture, leisure attractions, cultural industries and the like – perceived to underpin Manchester’s competitiveness as an international city. It would also mean bolstering the economic sectors deemed to have the greatest growth potential – information and communications technology, biotechnology, (private) professional and financial services, and (public) education and health services – as a way of propelling further economic development. There was particular emphasis on harnessing the asset of the city’s higher education institutions: what May and Perry (2003), in a report for M:KC, termed ‘knowledge factories’. Drawing on the usual reference points for knowledge-driven new industrial spaces – the Cambridges of Massachusetts and England and so on – the approach viewed universities as playing a central role in underpinning future growth via technology transfer, commercial exploitation of research, the physical remodelling of university estates and the development of specialisms in modish areas such as nanotechnology or (later) the development of graphene. Through graduate retention, there would also be a link to another plank of the strategy: the aim of what was referred to as ‘genius generation’, through encouragement for entrepreneurs, for example in cultural industries and digital technologies.
Similar themes were prominent in a subsequent initiative, with the publication in 2005 of a City-Regional Development Programme (CRDP). But although the substance of the CRDP was in line with the foci of the original M:KC documentation, its geography was rather different. It envisaged a much broader spatial coverage than before, supplementing the core set of districts around which most of the city-regional initiatives – from City Pride to M:KC – had been based, and extending beyond the ten districts of the old GMC to embrace the Manchester suburban commuter belt authorities which for several decades had resisted attempts to include them, and their base of affluent local tax payers, within the metropolitan area (Wannop, 1995). But this time, their inclusion was driven not by the politically combustible logic of fiscal consolidation and associated local government reorganisation, but by a desire to create a loose partnership covering a territory in which assets – developable land (especially greenfield sites), skilled ‘knowledge’ workers, and appealing neighbourhoods in which to house them – could be maximised and managed more effectively, in the interest of enhanced competitiveness. Indeed, as one leading local government interviewee, centrally involved in the city-region’s politics over several decades, agreed, it was probably only on this semi-formal basis that the Cheshire suburban districts would ever have agreed to enter into an alliance with the core Manchester districts and potentially compromise their autonomy as self-governing jurisdictions (interview, 2012).
Viewed in the context of historical efforts, many of them frustrated, to develop a more meaningful space for metropolitan governance, this city-regional geography therefore marked a significant step forward, uniting the core city with a large part of its suburban hinterland. It represented a significant turnaround in core–periphery relations within the city-region – in contrast to earlier suggestions by Manchester City Council that it might try to enlist government support in order to compel its unwilling neighbours to form part of an expanded core city local authority. This reversal was partly pragmatic recognition that the creation of an expanded unitary authority would be politically unpalatable, but also in part a reflection of the consensus amongst local policy elites inside and outside Manchester itself that looser and more flexible ‘soft’ collaborative governance was in any case preferable to the creation of permanent ‘hard’ structures. Both perspectives recognised that remaining tensions between Manchester City Council and the other districts at the core of Greater Manchester, and to an even greater extent enmity with the suburban authorities, would continue to limit the scope for translating collaborative inter-district goodwill into meaningful city-regional governance structures with any degree of formality, authority or permanence.
By 2006, protracted debate about the shape and form of city-regional governance culminated in pragmatic compromise around a more conservative geography based on the ten unitary authorities of the old GMC. This, as one interviewee noted, was preferable to the ‘vexed geographies’, bedevilled by conflict amongst constituent actors, which at times had characterised some of the previous attempts to develop more imaginative city-regional configurations which extended beyond the boundaries of the former GMC and related more closely to the conurbation’s functional limits. The potency of these earlier conflicts meant that it was only on this geographically less expansive basis that the city-region could realistically hope to gain sufficient agreement amongst institutional partners to formalise new metropolitan government (interview, 2012). Suggestions that Manchester was best-placed amongst England’s major cities to be a ‘trailblazer’ for the wider introduction of city-region mayoralties (Institute for Public Policy Research and North West Development Agency (IPPR and NWDA), 2006; Marshall and Finch, 2006) met with, at best, a lukewarm local response – and occasionally deep-seated unease amongst constituent and neighbouring local authorities about the prospect of a potential rival locus of power (Papas, 2006). By contrast, local elites were less perturbed by the prospect of a lighter-touch formal authority, based on a ten-district geography and with a focus on strategy-building without subsuming powers from existing local authorities. A new city-regional authority, in turn, would allow local political elites to broker agreement with central government over future devolution of power, and enhance the ability to procure resources not just on an ad hoc basis, but through further reforms to formal funding arrangements.
The upshot, then, was the compromise of a new city-regional structure which reflected the local consensus about the need for some form of supra-district approach in respect of local economic development ‘big issues’, but which avoided what was viewed by policy actors as the upheaval entailed in establishing a new bureaucracy that could draw resources, powers and status from the unitary districts. Following ‘city summits’ convened by central government for all of the core cities (AGMA, 2005), and subsequent submission to government of ‘business cases’ by each of the cities (Manchester City Council and AGMA, 2006a), Manchester and Birmingham were invited to prepare more detailed prospectuses. Manchester’s proposed a city-regional executive board, comprising the leaders of the constituent district local authorities, which would exercise strategic decision-making powers. The board would be drawn from the leaders of the ten Greater Manchester districts, but – significantly – would not include representation from the wider set of suburban authorities included in the CRDP. The executive board would be assisted by a business leadership council, and would oversee six strategic boards coordinating service delivery for economic development and skills, transport, crime, health, planning and housing, and the environment (Manchester City Council and AGMA, 2006b). Manchester’s embryonic city-regional government was beginning to take shape.
Formalising city-regional governance: Towards hard(er) structures
The succession of incipient city-regional structures began to be given some degree of permanence from 2007, with the announcement that a new authority was to be created to oversee city-regional policy-making. Using powers under the 1972 Local Government Act – the legislation under which the old GMC had been created – this was again to adopt a senatorial model in which power would continue to reside with the leaders of the constituent districts. The agreement was formalised from 2008 through a new AGMA constitution, based on the executive board of ten district leaders, advised by a business leadership council and six sectoral commissions led by local policy officials.
The emergence of a more formal, explicit structure for city-regional governance was significant. It represented an apparent challenge to the hitherto dominant view amongst local policy actors that city-regional governance ought to be flexible and adaptable, impermanent in form and shape and only semi-formal in constitution: a series of institutional relationships akin to ‘engagement rather than marriage’. The view within and outside the city-region was that Manchester – especially when measured against other major English cities – offered an exemplar of how local political consensus could be constructed elementally and incrementally, and in turn could underpin the gradual development of city-regional policy, culminating in the establishment of formal (but still lean and unobtrusive) institutions. This was the perspective that accompanied the announcement in the 2009 Budget that Manchester, with Leeds, was to be awarded pilot statutory city-region status. The pilot statutory city-region was to provide an umbrella, covering the array of organisations around which city-regional governance had cohered. It formed the basis for the eventual establishment in 2011 of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), becoming the first English city-region to establish a permanent statutory institution through which to coordinate economic development, regeneration and transport functions. As Table 2 shows, GMCA’s budget – inherited transport finance resources notwithstanding – was modest in comparison with mainstream local authority expenditure (some £1.7 billion in 2010/2011 for Manchester City Council alone), but its inception nevertheless marked the culmination of a protracted process of discretionary intergovernmental cooperation since the abolition of the GMC 25 years previously.
Function and finance of organisations in the ‘Manchester Family’.
Sources:
AGMA Statement of Accounts, 2010/2011.
Greater Manchester Centres of Excellence Business Plan, 2011/2012.
Greater Manchester Combined Authority Annual Statement of Accounts, year ended 2012.
Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority audited annual accounts, 2011.
Change of national government in 2010, with the election of a Conservative-led coalition, saw a shift in the wider policy context, but nevertheless continued to allow this hardening of soft institutional structures. Alongside the GMCA, a Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) was established in 2011, as part of an England-wide programme to replace Regional Development Agencies with a series of locally derived partnerships, led by business interests, which would determine locally tailored policy for self-delimited areas and thereby ‘rewrite the economic geography of the country – unconstrained by … top-down prescription’ (BIS, 2010). Crucially, Manchester’s LEP built on existing collaborative institutions, and the geography proposed by local actors was again to be coterminous with the GMCA. Continuity was also evident in the mix of public- and private-sector actors on the LEP’s board, which included the chair and vice-chair of the GMCA, with ex-officio representation from the latter’s recently established thematic strategic boards (see Figure 1). As one leading architect of city-regional governance in Manchester put it, ‘we would argue we had a LEP before the LEPs were even thought of’ (interview, 2013). An established tradition of institutional collaboration and cross-sector working via a relatively cohesive actor network, a geography that related to some degree to functional economic boundaries, and agreement amongst elites about economic priorities in the wake of the earlier Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER) meant that the LEP could ‘hit the ground running’ (Bailey and Bentley, 2012: 37). This was in contrast to the inter-agency conflicts and uncertainty about boundaries that slowed the process elsewhere (Pugalis and Townsend, 2012). Further coherence was engendered by the immediate need to develop local policy proposals, in response to central government’s rediscovered enthusiasm for competitive allocation of economic development finance. The resurrected national programme of Enterprise Zones provided one opportunity for the GMCA, the LEP and allied actors to refine existing proposals for a programme of economic development in the area around the growing (and municipally owned) Manchester Airport. The LEP also coordinated submissions to government seeking resources from the Regional Growth Fund: another discretionary grant funding programme launched to stimulate private-sector growth and offset the contraction in public-sector employment resulting from central government’s wider programme of austerity.
Manchester city-region institutions, 2012.
The renewed emphasis on promoting economic growth via competitively allocated grant funding to local economic development partnerships, alongside significant reductions in public expenditure, marked a dramatic change in the national political context which nevertheless enabled a strong degree of continuity in the evolution of city-regional governance and policy at the local level. Indeed, one senior local government interviewee argued that sustained reductions in central government funding of local authorities after 2010 provided a further spur for intergovernmental collaboration as local areas sought to offset their reduced capacity by seeking city-regional scale economies (interview, 2012) (see also Lowndes and Squires, 2012). At the same time, further development of city-regional governance was also facilitated by other innovations nationally. 2012 saw the announcement of Manchester’s City Deal, as part of government’s latest attempt to devolve to localities responsibility for financing and managing service provision in return for meeting contractually agreed efficiencies and innovations. It involved, inter alia, continuing emphasis on the attraction of inward investment, developing low-carbon initiatives with local businesses to help halve emissions by 2020, and formation of a business growth hub to coordinate support for firms from a network of public- and private-sector advisors. What was perhaps most significant about the City Deal, however, was the extent of devolution of financial responsibility, potentially giving city-regional institutions access to substantially enhanced resources. The most noteworthy innovation was the advent of a ‘revolving infrastructure fund’, drawing upon tax increment financing models. This would allow Greater Manchester to ‘earn back’ from central government an agreed share of any additional business tax revenue resulting from future increases in city-regional economic output associated with a £1.2 billion programme of local investment in infrastructure.
This model, as Bentley and Pugalis (2013) amongst others note, is one which offers enhanced freedom and flexibility to local areas, but at the cost of increased risk, as future local fiscal viability depends increasingly on improvement in urban economic performance. This model of ‘contractual localism’– enhanced local discretion but at a price determined by the centre – has also underpinned other innovations in city-regional governance. Alongside the ‘earn back’ scheme, further financial autonomy was conferred on the city-region in relation to both adult training, housing and economic development. For the former, in the order of £500 million annually was to be made available to spend on locally agreed provision, with a particular focus on a scheme to fund skills development by providing small firms with tax and other financial incentives. Local discretion in respect of housing was to be enhanced by developing an investment fund, supported by a pioneering deferred equity scheme, and via a new national initiative (the New Homes Bonus) intended to ‘nudge’ local areas to adopt more pro-development outlooks by allowing them to retain an increased fraction of any growth in tax revenues stemming from new house-building (GMCA, 2012). For wider economic development activity, in excess of £75 million funding to help deliver the Greater Manchester Strategy was to be provided in part via a new investment framework, drawing on competitively allocated Regional Growth Fund and Growing Places Fund allocations from central government (AGMA, 2012a).
City-regional policy and institution-building therefore exhibited marked continuity in its evolution, in line with a national policy context after 2010 which, while altered in some significant respects, continued to promote the need for the development of metropolitan institutions as a means of stimulating economic growth, and at the same time encouraging the rationalisation and formalisation of new structures. The maturing suite of city-regional bodies – what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Manchester Family’ (see, for example, AGMA, 2012b) – restored at least part of the institutional infrastructure lost with the abolition of metropolitan government a quarter of a century before – but over that period the substance of policy, and the politics underpinning it, changed markedly, as the next section goes on to document.
Towards post-political city-regional governance?
The paper thus far has tracked the complex series of policy and institutional changes, and the conflicts and debates underpinning them, that have accompanied the rebuilding of city-regional governance in Manchester over a period of more than a quarter of a century. This section attempts to interpret these and situate them in a wider context by exploring the extent to which Manchester’s experience embodies broader characteristics of contemporary city-regional governance. The remainder of the paper therefore explores two features said to characterise recent reforms to the governance of metropolitan areas: the priority accorded by city-regional institutions to economic growth concerns at the expense of more broadly based efforts to promote social wellbeing; and the emphasis on developing streamlined forms of decision-making and institutional structures which represent an erosion of local democracy.
In exploring these two dimensions, the paper draws upon recent ideas around the emergence of a post-political orthodoxy in respect of governance (see, for example, the varying perspectives of influential authors such as Badiou, 2005; Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 2004; Žižek, 1999). Swyngedouw (2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2011) has extended these ideas in the context of urban studies, arguing that contemporary city governance environments can be considered increasingly post-political – both in respect of the cessation of conventional conflict-based decision-making and the absence of meaningful citizen involvement in the policy-making process, and the unchallenged ascendancy amongst elite actors of neoliberal ideas about economic development. In respect of the former, it is argued, post-political forms of urban governance can be characterised by the colonisation of decision-making by policy elites, and the inclusion of others only on a restricted basis in which the limits of discussion and debate are systematically circumscribed by a pre-defined and suppositious consensus based on expertise that purports to be technical and non-ideological. Policy actors, it is contended, increasingly orchestrate debate around a narrow range of nonessential issues, enabling what is perceived as neutral deliberation, free from the corrosive influence of value-driven politics. Allmendinger and Haughton (2012: 90), discussing the reform of spatial planning in England from 2002, talk of a manufactured, ‘choreographed’ and depoliticised consensus, the narrow parameters of which are defined by technocratic mores dictated by a limited range of established state and para-state actors and other pre-approved ‘responsible partners’ (see also Swyngedouw, 2009). Beyond this, they argue, genuine popular engagement is illusory because elite actors ‘stage manage’ participation by constricting debate within narrowly delimited boundaries in which matters of technical detail are open to debate, but more fundamental substantive disagreement is deemed unacceptably and unhelpfully ‘political’ and therefore off-limits. Crouch (2004) views this as a kind of minimalist participation in which stakeholder involvement is actively managed in order to suppress dissent and marginalise ideas that divert from a pre-defined consensus. This involves constructing consensus around pro-market ideas deemed to be beyond legitimate challenge. The result (to paraphrase Swyngedouw, 2009: 609) is that meaningful political debate is foreclosed; the scope for alternative policy choices as a consequence is curbed, as the importance of pragmatic, post-ideological, pro-market ‘policy that works’ (or governance that works) is emphasised as paramount (Peck, 2011: 1). Policy decision-making based on conventional democratic mechanisms is rejected as obsolete, cumbersome and at odds with the kind of fleet-footed, adaptable and non-bureaucratic governance – management rather than politics – seen as best able to facilitate urban competitiveness. The effect is therefore to reinforce what MacLeod (2013: 2212) calls ‘growth-first neo-liberal reason’ as an intrinsic part of post-political governance.
Subsequent sections of the paper proceed to explore how far the evolution of city-region-based policy and governance accords to some of these defining characteristics of post-politics. First, the paper tracks the development of consensus around policy and institutional structures intended to promote economic development based on agglomerative growth; and second it explores the nature of thinking amongst local elites about city-regional policies and structures through which to promote this vision of future economic revitalisation.
Emphasis on agglomerative growth and the subordination of redistribution
Harding et al (2010) characterise what they view as the striking reversal of the city-region’s long-term economic decline as a ‘Manchester miracle’, highlighting as evidence marked growth in private producer and financial services employment, increasing levels of inward investment, inflated rental levels for prime office space, and growing levels of house-building, linked to a turnaround in long-term population loss and the reinvigorated attractiveness of the city as a place to live. This dramatic upswing, they argue, was the result not just of market trends during the ‘great moderation’ period of unbroken national economic growth in Britain from 1992 to 2008, but of the coherence of city-regional governance structures and related policy interventions, the stability of political leadership in the core city, the aptitude of its political elites in liaising with central government and attracting discretionary grant resources, and the improvement of the area’s image to external investors and skilled labour.
The ‘Manchester Miracle’ thesis rests on a view that the city-region, unlike many of its provincial counterparts, has in recent years begun to develop the kind of institutional infrastructure necessary to capitalise upon the increasingly agglomerative tendencies associated with contemporary urban economic development. This perspective holds that the cities that have profited most from agglomerative development to date have tended to be those whose economies are large, diverse and highly integrated – all characteristics that city-regional policy should be tasked with promoting (Harding, 2007: 450).
This has been a perspective that has been central to the consensus underlying many or most of the reforms to the governance of the Manchester city-region. Its pervasiveness might plausibly be viewed as constitutive of the degree to which a post-political orthodoxy has infused the thinking of policy elites: one based on the importance of expeditious, business-like governance of urban economies and the primacy of policy which promotes agglomerative economic growth. This was a perspective, for example, adopted from its outset by the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER), a study commissioned by the leading city-regional institutions in 2008 to highlight economic constraints and opportunities, and to identify implications for future policy and governance (McKillop, 2008). Overseen by a steering group including the then-chair of the pre-crash Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Tom McKillop, and the economist Edward Glaeser, the MIER espoused a formula for economic development that attached particular importance to the cultivation of a diverse economic base, maintenance of cohesive social relations and investment to promote high levels of skills amongst the workforce. Drawing on ideas around Richard Florida’s (2004) ‘creative classes’ thesis and Charles Landry’s (2008) creative city ‘toolkit’, the MIER epitomised what had become a consensual view amongst the city’s policy-makers that economic decline could best be arrested and an alternative post-industrial future developed by encouraging cultural dynamism, social diversity and tolerance, economic innovation and business entrepreneurship. This has meant using policy to help to attract and retain creative people – in the arts, sciences, architecture and so on – by emphasising cities’ cultural vitality, the appealing nature of their living environments and the inclusive nature of their social relations. It has also meant deploying policy intervention in support of creative institutions and ‘knowledge assets’ – notably research-intensive universities, from which wider economic benefits ensue via the transfer of technology and skills to local firms in high-value, high-skill sectors and clusters.
The MIER, like the Manchester Knowledge Capital Initiative before it, therefore cogently articulated the consensus underpinning the city-region’s approach to economic development that had developed over the course of the preceding decade: that Manchester’s future is dependent upon the core city and its capacity to remodel itself as a Floridian ‘learning region’, rich in knowledge-based industries and home to vibrant creative and scientific communities (see, for example, Bontje et al., 2010). Efforts to develop city-regional institutions have therefore been posited on the view that public policy has a critical role to play in building a critical mass of knowledge-based economic activity. This has been central to attempts to develop ‘white heat’ policy which promotes the development of dense concentrations of knowledge-rich economic activity, characterised by advanced skills levels amongst the labour force, high levels of innovation across firms and well developed links between businesses, economic development agencies and higher education (Rees and Harding, 2010). Thus, the city’s universities were viewed by the MIER not as insular ivory towers of scholarly learning, but as an intrinsic part of the developing urban knowledge economy: ‘part of Manchester’s business community … [,] enhancing the region’s capacity to innovate’ (MIER, 2009: 46).
Identifying areas and sectors with scope for economic growth, and targeting policy assistance towards them, has therefore been at the centre of the orthodoxy that permeates city-region-based interventions. Indeed, it has been highlighted by numerous authors as the basic raison d’être for recently established city-regional governance structures, allowing cities to secure competitive advantage over their peers by channelling support towards areas of potential growth. As one study for the Work Foundation argues, ‘effective local leadership [and] appropriate degrees of political autonomy’ are frequently a pre-requisite for knowledge-based economic development (Cannon et al., 2003: 37). Another report on the Manchester city-region by the Localis think-tank, similarly, argues for enhanced fiscal autonomy and decision-making powers at the city-region level in order to facilitate a growth-oriented approach in which a dynamic knowledge-rich urban economy provides opportunities for surrounding districts – an approach said to contrast with the distributive basis on which past intervention was based: ‘… policy must give up its obsession with equalisation … [and] … focus more on connecting places more effectively to the strong economic hubs of localities and regions’ (Forjan and Shakespeare, 2009: 10).
It is the subordination of past concerns about promoting socio-spatial equity, in favour of the more narrowly focused pursuit of agglomerative growth, regardless of area social context, that is one of the defining characteristics of the credo at the heart of the city-region’s politics. The accompanying discourse has been one rehearsed not just at national level, as the city-region’s policy leaders seek to convince central government to focus investment on untapped growth potential in the largest cities, but also within Greater Manchester. Harding et al. (2010: 981) discuss the existence of a ‘two-speed’ Manchester, in which the development of an already prosperous south of the city-region contrasts with decline in the north of the conurbation core and in its satellite towns. Pro-growth policy has increasingly focused on harnessing unrealised potential in the former, while managing decline and promoting restructuring and ‘catch-up’ in the latter. This has meant accommodating demand for growth via supply-side measures to assemble developable land, provide infrastructure and enable new housing construction in the south of the conurbation. Elsewhere, it has meant ameliorating the social consequences of long-term economic decline through regeneration policy, but also attempting to find new uses for deprived areas and linking them to current and anticipated opportunities evident in areas of the city-region with more buoyant economies. This formula has applied to housing regeneration, for example, where the Housing Market Renewal programme from 2002 to 2011 focused on ‘remodelling’ housing, redeveloping unpopular high-density terraced stock in poor neighbourhoods and developing lower density low-middle income inner suburban accommodation in order to stem the longer-term trend of suburbanisation and the exodus of skilled labour.
The link between Housing Market Renewal and wider city-regional economic development strategy stands as an instructive illustration of the extent to which a consensual pro-growth outlook has permeated areas that in the past were viewed as an adjunct of social policy. This kind of growth-fixated approach stands in marked contrast to the municipal socialism of the 1980s, to which the roots of local economic development efforts in provincial cities such as Manchester can be traced (see, for example, Gyford, 1985). The latter, as Quilley (2000) documents at length, involved an emphasis (in the words of the city’s then slogan) on ‘defending jobs’, offsetting market-driven economic restructuring and the profound contraction of the city’s manufacturing base via a strongly oppositional local politics aimed at resisting central government efforts to rationalise the local state, and pioneering, active and interventionist approaches to the promotion of indigenous industrial growth. The contrasting emphasis of contemporary city-regional policy on market-oriented growth marks the conclusion of a process that began in the late 1980s with the rise of a pragmatic local (and national) politics of ‘new realism’ on the left. Reviewing the highlights of a career spent in local government in Manchester, the city’s chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, cited the turnaround in central-local relations as a signal achievement:
I think my highlight was in the early 1990s when a so-called hard left council successfully negotiated with a Conservative government a funding package for the first phase of our light rail system … I think this showed more than anything our capacity to put place before party politics – a characteristic which applies to this day – and why we have one of the most formidable partnerships with business to be found anywhere. (Quoted in Minter, 2010)
This warming of relations with the centre subsequently enabled a wider growth coalition to evolve, extending across an array of public-sector bodies and including local business elites, linked initially to external bids for major sporting events. Robson (2002) notes the transformative influence of this coalition in providing a modus operandi for a host of future partnerships. Ward and Jonas (2004: 2121) contend that the ability to nurture these horizontal and vertical links was possible because city-regional policy has revolved around a core of widely accepted notions, which eschew ‘issues of redistribution, conflict, counterstrategies, and politics’.
Although the two-speed strategy involves a very marked emphasis on fuelling economic growth in already successful areas, this is not to deny the continued acknowledgement of wider socio-economic difficulties, reflecting Manchester’s (and, in particular, its inner area’s) position as consistently one of the most impoverished areas in successive indices of deprivation published by central government (see, for example, AGMA, 2008). These – as checks on the city’s economic growth potential and its desirability as a ‘liveable’ destination for skilled knowledge workers and the ‘creative classes’ – sit uneasily alongside the main thrust of city-regional economic development policy and its vision of Manchester as a future epicentre of knowledge-based economic wellbeing. This was a view acknowledged, at least in part, by the MIER, under which research was undertaken to consider the consequences of issues such as labour market exclusion and socio-spatial segregation of residents for the city-region’s competitiveness (McKillop, 2008). The point, however, is that while the MIER recognised the severity of these longstanding social problems, their resolution, it can be argued, was viewed largely in terms of the beneficial knock-on effects for the city-region’s competitiveness – and it is this which defines the consensus at the heart of the politics of local economic development in Manchester.
Emphasis on lean decision-making and the marginalisation of accountability and citizen involvement
A second aspect of the consensus that characterises the governance of Greater Manchester is the preference for institutional forms that are considered to be streamlined and efficient, exercising executive powers in a non-bureaucratic and business-like way. Manchester’s representations to parliament, as part of the process accompanying the formal designation of the GMCA, explicitly rejected the creation of ‘a bureaucracy to run the combined authority’, instead presenting it as ‘a way of saving in the long term by combining work’ (Lord Smith of Leigh, quoted in Hansard, 2011).
This commitment to non-bureaucratic administration is symptomatic of a desire amongst the city-region’s policy community, articulated by interviewees, to develop institutions that promote economic development but which operate in a manner more akin to a specialist government agency or quango than a formal elected local authority. As one of the key architects of city-regional structures in Manchester argued:
when we established the combined authority and its predecessors, the basis of it was that accountability ought to be ultimately back to the ward councillor who represents a locality, and there needs to be a chain of accountability that allows us to do that … (interview, 2013).
The latter involves scrutiny via local authority political representation on GMCA thematic panels, and formal reporting of city-regional decisions and deliberations to the executive committees of each of the constituent local authorities. By contrast, the same interviewee was vehement in rejecting the suggestion that GMCA might ultimately adopt a structure similar to the Greater London Authority (GLA), with scrutiny of an executive mayor via directly elected representatives:
Absolutely not! No, we have a far better model than the London model, which is effectively a dysfunctional model … We are wholly integrated … [whereas] the GLA has no influence on the mayor’s office. (Interview, 2013)
This thinking explains the suspicion with which intermittent efforts to inject direct democratic accountability into city-regional governance has been viewed in Greater Manchester. It provides a large part of the explanation, for example, for the lack of local enthusiasm in response to periodic central government encouragement for the introduction of directly elected mayors. Reporting to the Blair government, the Urban Task Force (2005: 17), for instance, argued in support of ‘mayors to integrate the city-region strategies and investment plans for regeneration, planning, housing, economic development and transport’. For the Cameron administration, elected mayors were targeted specifically at big city local authorities, as part of a wider set of measures in the Localism Act of 2011 aimed at encouraging bottom-up activism beyond (and as a challenge to) the local state. In both instances, however, the logic, drawing on London’s earlier experience, has been as much about instilling local leadership and allowing cities to acquire more potent national and international political voice as about democratising unaccountable bureaucracies. A report commissioned by the prospective Conservative government, for example, noted the need for cities to have a more powerful national political standing akin to that of US cities and advocated strengthened local leadership through elected ‘pan-city’ mayors in England (Cities Taskforce, 2007). A subsequent report to government by former Cabinet minister Michael Heseltine (2012: 57) similarly reiterated the need not only for enhanced urban leadership capacity, but specifically advocated legislation to provide for mayors for ‘wider city conurbations’.
Somewhat paradoxically, efforts to introduce what the Institute for Government and Centre for Cities (2011) call ‘metro mayors’ have been thwarted for the most part by an unlikely combination of popular antipathy towards politicians and their supposed profligacy, and local politicians’ resistance to the perceived imposition of political rivals with the potential to challenge their ascendancy and disrupt the day-to-day business of effective and efficient governance. The latter is especially significant because it illustrates the quintessentially post-political view amongst local political elites that popular scrutiny and citizen engagement are distracting and potentially disruptive influences on the development of effective policy (even if there are also occasional worries about voter disenchantment, anti-politician hostility and the resultant scope for challenge to the legitimacy of the local state). This is a view that has been articulated repeatedly over several years, dating back in the British context to the Urban Development Corporations (UDCs), established in the 1980s as an antidote to the inertia said to characterise multi-functional local authorities, hamstrung by their bureaucratic structures, inefficient working practices and burdensome requirement for periodic local electoral sanction.
Data from semi-structured interviews suggests similar thinking abounds amongst the policy elites driving territorial governance in Manchester and its region. Interviewees endorsed the assertion that while there have been repeated attempts to involve business interests in the governance of the Manchester city-region, little or no effort has been devoted to developing mechanisms for popular involvement. The rationale, in the view of a number of interviewees, has been a desire to extricate long-term strategic decision-making from the complications of changing local electoral politics. The advent of GMCA, and the formalisation of existing structures, was repeatedly attributed to a wish amongst policy actors to provide a more stable basis for agreement with central government about future investment around major strategic projects (notably the development of transport infrastructure), removing the scope for uncertainty and delay linked to changes in the political complexion of the city-region’s constituent districts.
The formal structure of the Manchester city-region is therefore one in which accountability exists only indirectly, through local councillor appointment to different elements of the combined authority. The result, interviewees accepted, is that awareness of city-regional politics is limited, beyond the narrow cadre of elite actors involved in the area’s governance. The labyrinthine structures that have emerged over more than two decades to progress the governance of the city-region have been developed beyond the gaze of supposedly apathetic local electors, to whom they remain largely illegible. In 2012, a referendum seeking approval for the introduction of an elected mayor for the core city of Manchester, as elsewhere, generated little enthusiasm, garnering the support of 47% of the one-quarter of the electorate who voted. This is likely to be symptomatic of wider citizen disillusion and detachment from local politics; in the context of the city-region and the impenetrable intricacy of its constituent structures, voter involvement remains restricted to proxy accountability where politicians elected at one scale (the ward) exercise authority at another (the city-region) (Headlam, 2011).
Lack of citizen participation in city-regional governance is important because what one interviewee identified as the ‘messiness’ of the complex array of different, overlapping and often transient soft spaces of governance that festoon northwest England would be difficult or impossible to sustain were these institutions to formalise and become subject to democratic sanction. Elite actor views canvassed suggest widespread contentment with existing arrangements, providing support for arguments that growth-first policy is viewed as best served by a post-political institutional environment characterised by limited regulation, cross-sector working, flexible inter-agency relations and pragmatic accommodation amongst mainstream political parties locally and nationally. As one key city-regional actor commented, informal institutions ‘offer more creative potential’, allowing, for example, selective engagement with other soft spaces like the business-led Atlantic Gateway growth corridor that links Manchester to Liverpool (Dembski, 2012; Harrison, 2013; interview, 2012). For another interviewee (2013), ‘flexibility and freedom where you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder’, either in terms of formal central government oversight or local electoral accountability, was something that allowed innovation, and in his view explained why the Manchester city-region had been recognised nationally for its effectiveness in developing economic strategy.
Conclusion: Post-political governance, Manchester style?
It is possible to argue, then, that the way in which city-regional structures and policy initiatives in Manchester have been constructed accords to wider ideas about the nature and evolution of post-political governance. The absence of direct democratic accountability across most or all of the city-regional structures developed reflects a view within the city-region’s policy community that, as Allmendinger and Haughton (2009: 619) put it, what matters is simply ‘getting things done’. The impermanence of many of the structures devised as a result of local preference for semi-formal working has itself limited the scope for regular citizen involvement. More recently, as is evident with the advent of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, even where semi-formal soft institutions have formalised, this has not been accompanied by direct democratic accountability.
Writing about the Cameron government’s localism agenda in England, Clarke and Cochrane (2013: 16) deploy the label ‘anti-politics’ to capture the notion that the subordination of traditional conflict-based politics to an apparently more consensual mode of decision-making – the depoliticisation process of which Rancière (2004) and Žižek (1999) write – conceals an underlying and ‘determinedly political’ attempt to promote the interests of elite actors and exclude others. Manchester’s experience provides partial support for the idea, as documented in respect of urban governance by, inter alia, Swyngedouw (2010b) and MacLeod (2011), that a defining characteristic of post-politics is active effort on the part of elites not only to mould consensus about the substance of policy and the nature of intervention, but consciously to promote a particular model for decision-making that is driven by technical, value-free and supposedly post-ideological expertise – the efficiency of which stands in contrast to conventional modes of politics in which conflict, bargaining and negotiation between actors exist as normal features of the democratic process. Interviewees in northwest England dismissed the idea that deliberate effort had been expended to insulate decision-making from popular participation or citizen accountability; instead, their argument was that for practical reasons direct democratic accountability for city-regional institutions had never been feasible because it would require substantial upheaval on a scale and at a cost that risked undermining what was felt to be a successful extant model of ‘good governance’. Deep-seated reluctance to embark on formal institutional restructuring was highlighted repeatedly by interviewees. It was said to relate partly to local disinclination to disrupt delicate subregional intergovernmental relationships honed – sometimes with no little difficulty – over many years. It was also said to relate to the realpolitik of relations between the local and national state, and the latter’s unwillingness to diverge from the successful model of adaptable and only semi-formal city-regional governance. The result, interviewees accepted, was a stable and successful Manchester-model for effective city-regional governance, acceptable to key players at the centre and locally: almost the kind of incontestable ‘natural order’ which Dikeç (2008), writing about French urban policy, highlights as a distinguishing feature of post-politics.
This latter point raises the issue of the extent to which Manchester’s policy elites have exercised meaningful discretion over the direction of policy, limited as they are by a longstanding national framework for local government in England in which fiscal autonomy is severely curtailed. This is partly because of a desire to promote inter-area fiscal equalisation but also reflects a reluctance on the part of the centre to grant local areas freedom to raise resources and develop locally authored policy. Lack of fiscal autonomy has been an enduring feature of British local government, but even when the centre has promoted greater local discretion it has sometimes been accompanied by the imposition of performance targets, the application of pre-requisites about structures for local decision-making, or prescriptive direction about the substance of local intervention.
The unbalanced nature of relations between national and local branches of the state therefore provides part of the explanation for the limited parameters within which city-regional policy has been framed. It provides support for the recurring argument outlined by Manchester’s policy community that accommodation with central government is a pragmatic necessity. Partial gains in local autonomy have come in a context of highly centralised decision-making, diminishing funds and with strings attached. The point here is that the nature of the state, and in particular the subordinate position of the local relative to the national state, needs to be taken into account when trying to understand the ways in which apparently post-political local institutional structures and modes of decision-making have materialised. These structural interrelationships between centre and locality mean that local actors have limited scope for diverging from particular strategies of institutional innovation, thereby limiting the extent of local debate. This, when added to the accompanying reluctance to disrupt ‘good governance’, means there is very limited incentive to promote citizen inclusion in decision-making.
A second set of conclusions centre on the lessons that can be derived from the case study experience in respect of the wider substantive emphasis of policies pursued by city-regional institutions. While the process of rebuilding city-regional governance has been intermittently disrupted by conflicts linked to the structure and spatial coverage of new institutions, contestation over the substance of intervention has been much more difficult to discern. The Manchester case, at least in respect of broad approaches to economic development policy, provides support for what Brenner et al. (2010) refer to as the ‘deep(ening) neoliberalization’ of territorial policy, in which the longstanding emphasis of policy on combating uneven development has been succeeded by one in which inter-regional inequality is tolerated. As Gardiner et al. (2011) note, despite the ambiguous nature of supporting empirical evidence, deploying policy to support urban agglomeration in already prosperous cities or regions, rather than combating spatial disparity, has been viewed increasingly by policy-makers as a means of contributing to national competitiveness.
Across the different city-regional initiatives developed in Manchester, the paper has attempted to demonstrate the clear signs of convergence around the fundaments of an orthodoxy in local economic development geared towards facilitating urban agglomeration: that intervention is needed to help create the conditions in which international investors can prosper; that policy should actively support a dynamic regionally based research and development capacity; that ‘assets’ such as the education and skills base are critical to the production of ‘knowledge’ and its use to enhance place competitiveness; that policy in its most general sense should be directed towards making cities and regions internationally significant actors; but that the role of the state ought as far as possible to be one of minimalist night-watchman, regulating markets in a light-touch way and intervening only in a selective and highly targeted manner in support of capital accumulation (see, for example, Peck, 2010).
These are notions that are prominent in the Manchester case study, where a multilevel coalition involving Manchester City Council and its city-based allies has coalesced around a vision of the city as future epicentre of knowledge-based economic activity. Indeed, that initial moves towards city-regional governance were driven largely or exclusively by concerns about economic development, rather than about modernising governance in a much more general sense or about tackling social inequality, has for some years been acknowledged unashamedly within Whitehall and viewed as a virtue: ‘city-regions are an essentially economic proposition … it is not about a new form of governance’, as one senior civil servant commented (Neil Kinghan, former director general of local government, Department of Communities and Local Government, quoted in House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee, 2007: 7).
But while the focus of policy activity is squarely on economic growth, there remains some acknowledgement of the need to address social problems. This, though, is in line with recognition of the existence of hybrid forms of neoliberalism, informed by pro-market thinking but also by a more diverse set of ideas, superimposed on an uneven legacy of inherited policy (Cochrane, 2007). As Harding (2007: 456) notes, ‘explicit city-regionalism … is not intrinsically devoid of progressive intent or possibilities’. Nonetheless, whatever ‘possibilities’ exist for redistributive policy-making, the empirical experience of Manchester is significant in broader historical terms in that it illustrates the striking degree to which the role and purpose of spatial policy has been redefined. Policy for regions in Britain, back to the 1930s, had its roots in concerns about redistributing economic growth and denting inter-regional social and economic disparity (see, for example, Robinson et al., 1987). City-regions, likewise, are historically rooted in concerns about facilitating effective and progressive land use, labour market, transport and social planning (see, for instance, Geddes, 1915) – and, by connecting core city and suburban satellites, providing a more stable fiscal base through which to achieve this. The limited and diminishing emphasis given to these kinds of concern in approaches from the late 1990s onwards, it can be concluded, is evidence of a wider shift in the focus of policy and governance for subnational territories. This is a shift in which a ‘new territorial politics’ (Morgan, 2001) is prominent, based on institutionalised inter-area competition and a desire, regardless of inter-regional inequalities, to promote growth. In contrast to the original vision of city-regional institutions or policymaking as a means of contributing to economic equality, social justice or fiscal equalisation, the agenda underlying contemporary efforts to develop city-regional policy is one driven almost entirely by a concern to induce further economic growth and which, if not quite blind to distributional issues, is generally sanguine about them. That applies both to city-regions of existing prosperity and to ones, such as Manchester, where the objective is one of revitalisation and regeneration. While it is possible to criticise the kinds of contemporary city-regional efforts discussed here on the grounds of their overly constricted focus on economic growth, and their insufficient emphasis on tackling social problems, it is important not to lose sight of the continuing potential for city-regional policy and governance to provide an effective means of promoting social and environmental justice, as well as economic advancement.
Footnotes
Funding
The interviews on which the paper is based were undertaken as part of research on ‘Soft Spaces, Spatial Planning and Territorial Management in Europe’, funded by Forschungs- und Wissenschaftsstiftung Hamburg and coordinated by the Urban Planning and Regional Development Research Unit at HafenCity University Hamburg.