Conceptualising ‘generative power’: Evidence from the city-regions of England

Abstract

Chinese

Literature on sub-national governance and leadership has frequently suggested that elected leaders can use influence and facilitation skills alongside coercive power, legal responsibilities and resources to achieve policy outcomes. This article investigates the degree to which influence, networking and leadership – or ‘generative power’ – can themselves extend a sub-national body’s ‘capacity to govern’. It uses empirical data from the activities of the six ‘metro-mayors’ elected in England in 2017 to explore whether new institutions, faced with tight limits on policy divergence and institutional and financial resources, seek to transcend these via generative power, and whether the types of generative power used are in line with the previous literature. Findings indicate that many of the previous patterns of generative power are followed in the English case, but also that generative power has not dominated the metro-mayors’ early priorities. Their focus on the distribution of funds suggests that they may develop into ‘grant coalitions’, maximising funds from central government in place of developing a distinct local strategy. The article contributes to the literatures on urban leadership and sub-national governance, and also has implications for jurisdictional design.

Keywords

governance informality local government place branding policy

Introduction

If mayors were to ‘rule the world’, in the words of Benjamin Barber, what would distinguish their practice of government from that of nation-states? Scholarship suggests as possibilities a combination of the right mix of formal and informal institutions (Horlings et al., 2018); the presence of ‘generative leadership’ (Sotarauta, 2016); and integrating the strategic demands of a place, in contrast to central authorities’ functional approach (Beer and Clower, 2014). Through network governance, trust and informal/personal relations, the stock of power available to mayors can be enhanced, and their legal constraints transcended, comprising ‘place leadership’. This view recalls Stone’s (1980) distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’. It appears in both academic and practitioner literature, via cognate terms such as ‘influencing’, ‘facilitation’ and ‘cajoling’ (Fenwick and Elcock, 2014; Greasley and Stoker 2008; iUrban, 2016; Sotarauta and Beer, 2017). It underlies typologies of different forms of power and leadership exercised by mayors and sub-state authorities, but also by ‘place leaders’ more broadly, to maximise their purchase on their locality.

It is comparatively rare to find explorations of the policy initiatives and mechanisms through which these different forms of power are exercised, with much scholarship focusing on leadership, network governance and participants’ perceptions. The influence of a mayor’s institutional inheritance on how they seek to exercise power has been comparatively neglected. This article fills this gap by analysing policy initiatives undertaken by the new tier of ‘metro-mayors’ first elected in England in 2017. Due to their limited legal powers and funding, these mayors could be expected to lean towards exercising the softer, ‘generative’ dimensions of power. The article explores whether their policy initiatives can be categorised according to the definitions of power found in literature on place-based leadership.

Recent developments in England provide a useful case study to explore the relative importance of the softer, ‘generative’ dimensions of power and the ‘harder’ forms of institutional power (legal duties) and resource power (spending). Devolution of power within England has historically been light on institutional responsibilities, encouraging its recipient bodies to look to generative leadership to supplement – perhaps even supplant –‘power over’ (Hambleton, 2015; Harding, 1991; Stoker, 1995). The ‘devolution deals’ that established the eight metro-mayors in England in the mid-2010s explicitly anticipate this (Ayres, 2017; Bailey and Wood, 2017; iUrban, 2016; Lent and Studdert, 2018; Raikes, 2017). Many scholars have downplayed the possibility of meaningful policy divergence by the new bodies, citing the tight structure of metagovernance within which metro-mayors operate (Bailey and Wood, 2017; Hambleton, 2017; Lowndes and Lempriere, 2018; Tomaney, 2016).

The article uses data from the first 18 months of the English metro-mayors’ terms of office to answer two main questions. First, do the metro-mayors’ activities fall within definitions of the power used in ‘generative leadership’? The article draws upon definitions of the categorisations of leadership employed by place-based leaders developed by Sotarauta (2016) and John and Cole (1999). Second, do metro-mayors focus on the use of generative power in the absence of substantial institutional and resource power? Here evidence suggests that ‘generative leadership’ has not been a dominant feature of the English metro-mayors’ activities since May 2017. The use of their limited statutory powers and distribution of resources has featured just as strongly, if not more so, in their activities. This has international implications for institutional, and jurisdictional, design. If mayors favour institutional and resource power – even when they are weak in comparative terms – over generative leadership, this suggests that claims that generative leadership can supplant those forms of power may be misplaced. This aligns with the literature on place-based leadership, which emphasises the need for a ‘mixed economy’ of powers and responsibilities (Horlings et al., 2018; Sotarauta, 2016; Sotarauta and Beer, 2017).

The article is organised into four sections. The first provides a review of literature on power, leadership and network governance. The second provides a brief outline of English devolution policy in the 2010s, noting its focus on influence, stakeholders and partnership. The third section shows that the use of power by English metro-mayors follows patterns previously observed in the literature on ‘place leadership’. It uses a thorough documentary analysis of data from the websites of mayoral combined authorities (MCAs – the statutory institutions headed by ‘metro-mayors’) to flesh out how power has been exercised, using categories of power derived from John and Cole (1999) and Sotarauta (2016). The fourth section notes the continued pertinence of institutional and resource powers, particularly grant-making, for metro-mayoral activities to date. The conclusion suggests that these findings have lessons internationally for jurisdictional design. Partnership, leadership and trust depend upon elected officials bringing substantive institutional and resource power to the negotiating table.

The exercise of power

The influence of different forms of power on local governance outcomes was investigated in the 1970s and 1980s via the concepts of ‘urban regimes’ and ‘urban growth coalitions’ (Harding, 1991; Logan and Molotch, 1987; Stone, 1980). These studies drew on the earlier formulations of the nature of power from scholars such as Dahl (1957) and Lukes (1976). Dahl’s definition states that ‘A has power over B to the extent that he [sic] can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (Lukes, 1976: 11–12). Lukes adds to this a ‘two-dimensional view’, through which A could exercise power over B via ‘coercion, influence, authority, force or manipulation’ (Lukes, 1976: 17); and a ‘three-dimensional view’, involving control of the political agenda and neutralising issues either via ‘social forces and institutional practices’ (Lukes, 1976: 24) or decision-making (or non-decision-making).

Applying these concepts to community decision-making, Stone distinguished between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’. ‘Power over’ refers to coercion, or the threat of coercion, as expressed in Dahl’s definition above. ‘Power to’ denotes an indirect relationship, changing others’ actions by marshalling broader relationships, reputation and incentives in place of direct coercion. Alternatively, an individual or body may use power to not make a decision or not act –‘determining how conflict will be shaped or opposition prevented’ (Stone, 1980: 981). In either case, awareness of their ability to exercise ‘power to’ may trigger ‘anticipated reactions’ from those who might be subject to their power.

‘Urban regimes’ make use of these forms of power to transcend limits to their capacity. They set political agendas in line with the interests of the regime participants – principally local economic interests – who hold resources that are critical to the policies pursued by elected officials. This allows public bodies to harness and exercise systemic power; the price is some loss of control over policy to the other participants, diluting the impact of electoral preferences.

From urban regimes to place leadership

Urban regime theory sought to explain gulfs between electoral preferences and policy outcomes, whilst research into urban growth coalitions studied the creation of multi-sector partnerships aimed at increasing investment, employment, infrastructure and prosperity. More recently, similar policy aims have been pursued through various forms of ‘place leadership’, integrating local interests and multiple policy matters within a (relatively) identifiable geography, institutionalising collaboration between different actors (Beer and Clower, 2014; Collinge and Gibney, 2010; Sotarauta and Beer, 2017). Whilst it can relate to project-based and time-limited collaborations, place leadership can also comprise local elected leaders, within permanent institutions, faced by multiple constraints and pressures to generate working relationships focused on common goals. Whilst urban regimes subverted democratic preferences, place leadership is viewed as a means to increase the quantum of ‘power to’ available to all participants. Although the literature on place leadership rarely explicitly explores the concept of power, or the implications of power imbalances in local governance, the concepts introduced by Stone and Lukes find a reflection in scholarship on the activities of sub-state leaders. ‘Power over’‘is about the narrow exercise of power … [whilst “power to”] is about exercising power so all other actors can exercise their potential’ (John and Cole, 1999: 101); a place leader ‘can generate capacity more by persuasion and finding the best in others than through the efforts and authority of office’ (John and Cole, 1999: 102).

Place leadership sits at the intersection of at least three recent trends. One is the shift identified from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ from the 1980s onwards (Pierre and Peters, 2000; Rhodes, 1988; Skelcher, 2000). These terms captured a perceived shift from autonomous, powerful state entities able to act freely via legal power and institutional capacity (Capano et al., 2015; Rhodes, 1988) to a more dispersed and diffuse web of institutions and relationships. This coincided with a rise in awareness of ‘wicked issues’ (Collinge and Gibney, 2010; John and Cole, 1999): cross-cutting policy challenges not easily handled by single-purpose governments, and thus ostensibly appropriate for an approach securing multiple organisations’‘enabling resources’ (Sotarauta and Beer, 2017). Place leadership is presented as a means to restore, or augment, governments’ capacity for autonomous action by harnessing these resources (Bentley et al., 2017; Greasley and Stoker, 2008; Hambleton and Sweeting, 2014; Horlings et al., 2018).

This interacts with a second distinct trend, which is towards multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2016). Where new sub-state elected bodies are created, they may turn to place leadership as a source of Stone’s ‘power to’, to address local policy issues in a holistic manner. Elected leaders seeking to assert their legitimacy and deliver manifesto promises may view place leadership as a route to transcending the formal limits of their office. Where public authorities have abandoned (or never held) ‘power over’ a policy space, or demands arise for action on ‘cross-cutting issues’, an elected leader may seek to fill the gap via a coalition of interests and partners, increasing his/her ‘capacity to govern’. This approach may also aim to transcend the metagovernance frameworks that central governments will often seek to impose in multi-level systems (Bailey and Wood, 2017; Davies, 2011; Etherington and Jones, 2017). In practice, broad-based local leadership could permit localities to take advantage of central governments’ distance from day-to-day decision-making, creating space for local leaders to reinterpret central demands (Sotarauta and Beer, 2017).

Third, ‘leadership’ itself has received considerable recent scholarly attention (Hambleton, 2015; Sweeting and Hambleton, 2017). Rapidly shifting policy contexts and cross-cutting challenges increase the pressure on mayors to ‘lead’ on behalf of their place, irrespective of limits to their institutional power. That may include aggregating and harnessing dispersed local capacity (Horlings et al., 2018), or making use of available networks of public, private and third sector organisations (John and Cole, 1999; Sotarauta, 2016). Scholars emphasise the importance of trust and relationships in developing enduring partnerships: this highlights that place leadership sits at least partly outside democratic institutional structures, constituting a form of what Sarah Ayres has described as ‘informal governance’ (Ayres, 2017; Ayres et al., 2017). ‘Place leaders’ do not follow the mould of the ‘heroic’ or ‘great’ leader, and equally, they need not be directly-elected officials: they may emerge from non-public local institutions that have substantial interests or capacity in a particular policy area. Place leadership is relational (Horlings et al., 2017; Sotarauta and Beer, 2017), and focuses on collaboration and consensus rather than formal powers (Collinge and Gibney, 2010).

The place leadership toolbox

Despite the emergent, informal quality of place leadership, institutional structures have a critical influence on what place leaders do (Sotarauta and Beer, 2017). Elected mayors, with limited powers and resources, must select projects and priorities that match electoral preferences with the powers, functions and duties available to them; and the design of the institutions therefore assumes critical importance to the mix of powers utilised by elected mayors. The leadership literature has developed classifications of forms of power used by leaders. John and Cole (1999: 102) propose four types of leader: the caretaker; the city boss; the visionary; and the consensual facilitator. The latter two are associated with ‘power to’ and the former two with ‘power over’. The visionary is the one who ‘can knock heads together, who can break down some of the recalcitrance and divisions in urban politics and who is able to establish more creative policies and effective co-ordination’ (John and Cole, 1999: 102–103), whilst the consensual facilitator ‘has learnt about the importance of partnership and networks and keeps abreast of national and local policy debates as they rapidly change’ (John and Cole, 1999: 103).

John and Cole’s scheme has affinities with the typology of place leaders’ power proposed by Sotarauta (2016). Sotarauta derives four sources of power from his study of economic development actors in Finland:

Institutional power – the power to demand that other actors act differently;

Resource power – use of regional development funds; ability to reward other actors; and ‘slack resources’– time and money to achieve objectives;

Interpretive power – expert knowledge, and new concepts and thinking patterns enabling actors to see things differently;

Network power – personal networks; trust and respect; good media relations.

The first two of these equate to formal legal powers and funding respectively: conventional forms of ‘power over’. In contrast, ‘interpretive power’ has clear affinities with the approach of John and Cole’s ‘visionary’ leader, whilst ‘network power’ recalls their ‘consensual facilitator’. Practitioner literature emerging from the English debate contains similar concepts. Consensual facilitation is echoed in ‘informal governance’ (Ayres, 2017), ‘curating networks’ (Bailey and Wood, 2017), ‘facilitative local leadership’ (Fenwick and Elcock, 2014), ‘leveraging’ (Fai and Tomlinson, 2018) and bringing together actors from various sectors to generate ‘innovation zones’ (Hambleton, 2015). The idea of the visionary leader setting a long-term agenda is echoed by ‘championing’ (Raikes, 2017: 11) and ‘place shaping’ (Bennister et al., 2017; Blakeley, 2017; Hambleton, 2015; iUrban, 2016).

If sub-state leaders use these forms of power to enhance their ‘governing capacity’ (John and Cole, 1999: 98), the mechanisms used to do so bear closer examination. How important are these tools to elected leaders compared with the more conventional resources associated with ‘power over’? After all, envisioning and facilitation are themselves relatively unexceptional behaviours that (should) occur within all organisations. Their significance to place leadership would arise if they are used by an elected official/government aiming to extend its capacity to govern in ways that are not available via institutional or resource power. In other words, do they constitute a new approach to governing, one that does not need coercive or financial resources to achieve outcomes? I term this ‘generative power’, following Sotarauta’s (2016)‘generative leadership’. Do elected officials, in practice, deliberately exercise these types of power, with the aim of extending their capacity to govern: and do they privilege this over conventional legal and financial resources? If they do, this leads in turn to the potential to uncover lessons for institutional and even jurisdictional design, as ‘governments have a role in creating the conditions under which leadership can emerge’ (Beer and Clower, 2014: 6). Could the promise of generative power act as a corrective to Sotarauta and Beer’s (2017) claim that centralised systems of governance are not conducive to place-based leadership?

Generative power and English devolution

The question of whether generative power can function as a substitute for institutional and resource power has particular pertinence in England. The history of all hitherto existing proposals for English devolution is the history of squaring a very British circle: how to accede to demands for greater local control over resources and decision-making whilst simultaneously maintaining the UK’s essentially centralised system of governance (Richards and Smith, 2015). The answer to this ‘question’ throughout the last 50 years has been some version of generative power (Sandford, 2019). There are some justifications for this route. England has no tradition of political expression of strong local identities, nor is there consensus on the boundaries of sub-national economic units; but the lack of a tradition of localising power is more critical.

The current generation of English devolution –‘devolution deals’– was initiated by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, via the ‘Greater Manchester Agreement’ of November 2014. This committed the UK government to devolving a number of powers, programmes and budgets to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which would have a directly-elected mayor established to lead it. Between 2014 and 2016, further ‘devolution deals’ were agreed with 12 areas (Martin et al., 2015; Pike et al., 2016), though three have since collapsed. Mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) were created, and ‘metro-mayors’ were elected, in six areas in May 2017, with one additional election in each of 2018 and 2019. Participating local authorities are members of the MCA: whilst they can block mayoral action under certain circumstances, they cannot make decisions without the mayor’s support. Thus, any exercise of generative power is carried out by, or is at the behest of, the mayor rather than the MCA. Statutory backing is provided via a series of Orders under the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016. The mayoral combined authorities have more extensive formal powers than their predecessors in England, the Regional Chambers/Assemblies established between 1998 and 2010 (Sandford, 2005). They also have statutory legal existence, in contrast to the non-statutory Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) introduced in England in 2010–2011. They hold authority over spending programmes, having the power to create binding plans and control budgets in the low hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

Whilst critiques of the deals highlight powers that remain outside MCA control (Martin et al., 2015; Pike et al., 2016; Tomaney, 2016), the ‘devolution deals’ are suffused with the concept of generative power. A majority of the commitments in the deal texts consist of joint working or ‘exploring’ policy areas. Their presentation as substantive items in the deals hints that these are viewed as substitutes for formal powers. Furthermore, many of the statutory powers ‘devolved’ to metro-mayors are concurrent (Bailey and Wood, 2017; Lowndes and Lempriere, 2018; Moran et al., 2018), thus they cannot be exercised effectively without building multilateral relationships. The Adult Education Budget and local employment support services are two examples.

This rhetorical emphasis on generative power in the English debate easily slips over into a sense that it can supplant legal powers and funding, rather than merely supplement them. From this perspective, capable local mayors should have little need of legal powers, money or organisational heft in order to get things done. Latent capacity in the local business community, university sector and third sector can be unleashed by the presence of a leader with the power to convene, lobby and act as a ‘voice for the region’ (Beel et al., 2017; Hambleton, 2016; Harding, 1991). There is a degree of support for this perspective from the literature: for instance, Sotarauta and Beer (2017: 5) note that Finland’s regional councils ‘do not have adequate resources to implement planned policy measures and they therefore stress their role as mediators, facilitators and initiators’.

Whilst the idea that such roles can and should supplant institutional and resource power is rarely explicitly articulated, its tacit presence in the English debate serves a number of rhetorical purposes. It provides a counter-argument to the claim that metro-mayors represent a form of centralisation, a delegation of central objectives or ‘policy dumping’ (Bailey and Wood, 2017; Hambleton, 2017; Kenealy, 2016; Pike et al., 2016; Richards and Smith, 2015; Tomaney, 2016). It also valorises the idea that negotiation, trust and relationship-building provide a more effective route to decision-making and policy outcomes than the messy and conflictual business of politics (Davies 2011; Etherington and Jones, 2017). This view is built into the very decision-making structures of the MCAs, which require member local authority support for most mayoral decisions. Third, it facilitates blame-shifting: the responsibility for failures within English devolution, real or perceived, could in future be attributed to the failure of the mayors themselves to utilise their generative power effectively.

Metro-mayors: Activities and classification

If generative power could supplant resource and institutional power, one might expect the relatively weak English metro-mayors to make frequent and evident use of it. To explore this possibility, this section investigates policy initiatives undertaken by the six metro-mayors first elected in 2017, and their MCAs, between May 2017 and the end of 2018. These are Greater Manchester; Liverpool City Region; Tees Valley; West Midlands (WMCA); West of England (WECA); and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough (CPCA). The mayors elected in 2018 and 2019 are omitted due to lack of data. England provides an ideal source of empirical data for a number of reasons. First, the metro-mayors and MCAs are new institutions, and therefore their activities constitute a live debate within English local governance. Second, constraints on their institutional and resource power have been repeatedly highlighted, with the inference that this will limit their effectiveness (Pike et al., 2016; Sandford, 2017; Tomaney et al., 2017). Any indications that generative power countered this difficulty would have wider international implications for institutional and jurisdictional design.

This section presents data from a comprehensive documentary analysis of news releases on the MCA websites between May 2017 and December 2018. Each news item was analysed and policy activities were identified, where applicable, that fell into the categories of ‘envisioning’ or ‘convening’. Quotes are used from the documentation in the manner of data. The initiatives and policies found in the news items were triangulated with published documentation and ‘grey literature’, such as reports in the local government sector media, scholarly articles, blogs and practitioner and think-tank reports, to provide impartial confirmation of the data.

Envisioning

Metro-mayors have attempted to forge a regional ‘vision’ or ‘narrative’ via the production of ‘strategy’ documents. Examples include an education, employment and skills strategy (Tees Valley), a cultural strategy (Liverpool), a drugs and alcohol strategy (Greater Manchester) and an integrated regional strategy (CPCA). These are written visions, setting out a direction of travel for all actors in the region without necessarily committing the MCA to delivering the strategy’s contents. This harnesses the knowledge, credibility and partnership of non-state actors (Bentley et al., 2017; Greasley and Stoker, 2008; Hambleton and Sweeting, 2014). In Greater Manchester, the LEP and the Health and Social Care Partnership have signed up to the GMCA’s ‘single regional strategy’. Liverpool’s ‘Apprenticeship Growth Plan’ includes five priorities, four of which concern bodies other than the combined authority, such as local employers and the LEP.

Envisioning is not purely policy-focused. It extends to explicit projection of the capacity and influence of MCAs, building an image of them as ‘peak organisations’. News releases regularly associate metro-mayors with positive news on matters partly or entirely outside their remits, or blur the lines between MCA decisions and those of partner organisations such as LEPs, or other public bodies. The metro-mayors seek to function as ‘avatars who embody abstract concepts of ideologies or place, community and politics that are both territorial and relational’ (Jayne, 2011: 805). Activity of this kind falls into three categories.

One is the phenomenon of MCA websites reporting decisions made and programmes led mainly or fully by other bodies in their area, implying that these arise from the mayors’ own initiative. Examples include proposed new towns and the ‘East West Rail’ initiative in CPCA, the Visitor Economy Board in Liverpool City Region and the Compass programme in Tees Valley. CPCA’s strategic plan prioritises the upgrade of the A47 trunk road, though this requires investment from Highways England, the national trunk roads agency. Liverpool City Region highlighted a programme of action against violence against women, most of which consisted of initiatives led by the police authority.

Second, mayors have also made announcements or low-cost commitments that function as ‘virtue signals’, symbolic evidence of a mayor’s pride in the locality and awareness of the concerns of their electorate. Examples include an annual Mental Health Commission awards event (WMCA), a charity ball (CPCA), a ‘march against loneliness’ (Tees Valley) and an appeal to employers to release staff for suicide prevention training (Liverpool). These initiatives play into the concept of the mayor as ‘voice of the region’, the purpose of which is as much to articulate electoral demands as to implement them. Third, there are examples of speculative policies that are likely to be undeliverable on electoral timescales. Examples include the West of England mayor’s aspirations to open a number of railway stations, demands for improvements on Northern Rail (Liverpool and Greater Manchester) and the Tees Valley mayor’s call for protected status for the Middlesbrough ‘parmo’, a local fast-food offering:

We need to officially protect the provenance of this local delicacy and must make it abundantly clear that the genuine article is only from Teesside … Securing PDO status would mean that people would know they were getting the real deal when eating a parmo. (Tees Valley Mayor, n.d.)

Convening/facilitation

Convening has taken four primary forms: ‘summit’-style events, advisory groupings, brokerage and ambassadorial work. One-off, high-profile events may be held to raise the profile of a particular policy matter, stimulate investment or link economic actors. Examples include an offshore wind summit and a ‘business summit’ (Tees Valley); and skills or careers events, such as the Liverpool City Region’s ‘skills show’ in April 2018, seeking to bring local employers together with prospective apprentices and employees. This is an example of a limited form of ‘civic boosterism’ (Harding, 1991; Moran et al., 2018). Tees Valley has held six ‘business summits’, featuring ‘practical seminars, inspirational workshops, one-to-one support meetings, advice for individuals looking to start a business and networking opportunities’ (Tees Valley). Venturefest in Bristol, and the International Festival of Business in Liverpool, sought to bring businesses together and promote local investment.

Alternatively, summits may facilitate policy debates. WMCA explored issues such as homelessness, hate crime and leadership at a ‘faith summit’ in November 2017. CPCA held a ‘housing summit’ in July 2017 at which ‘a pledge was laid down to accelerate much-needed high quality housing in Cambridgeshire’; Greater Manchester has held a ‘digital and tech summit’ and a ‘green summit’, leading to an action plan for local partners (Greater Manchester); and Liverpool held a mental health summit in March 2018. Such events constitute active attempts to generate policy networks (Pierre and Peters, 2000; Rhodes, 1988), by building relationships with public and private sector partners and facilitating horizontal partner relations (Hambleton, 2016; John and Cole, 1999).

Advisory groupings may take general or policy-specific form. Many mayors have established task-and-finish policy ‘commissions’, composed of local and sometimes national figures. For instance, WMCA established a Mental Health Commission, chaired by Norman Lamb MP; CPCA has established an ‘independent economic commission’; and WMCA’s Productivity Commission plans to ‘develop collaborative research and analysis to underpin and shape advice on productivity issues’.

Mayors have also established standing ‘advisory boards’ that bring together local stakeholders: these provide general capacity for policy review and integration by defined coalitions of interests, without specific delivery aims. Examples include the Fairness and Social Justice Advisory Board (Liverpool), the LGBT Advisory Group, and Advisory Group on the Night-time Economy (Greater Manchester) and the Clean Air Coalition (WMCA). Such groups build local policy capacity and demonstrate local unity, facilitating lobbying governments or firms for investment; and they also strengthen stakeholder trust.

Mayors have also brokered voluntary changes in behaviour or initiatives amongst local businesses. These, mostly minor, initiatives foster the institutional and electoral legitimacy of the mayor and they are often couched in terms of mayoral strategic objectives. The mayors bring the ‘electoral chain of command’ (Dearlove, 1973: 25) to bear on stakeholders, both to cajole them to take part in mayoral initiatives and to guarantee profile for their doing so. The Greater Manchester ‘Take a Seat’ initiative encourages property owners to make seats available in public places for the elderly or those less able to stand: ‘businesses that sign up to the scheme are also given a checklist of ways to make their premises more age- and dementia-friendly’ (Greater Manchester). Transport for the West Midlands has installed free phone-charging points at 10 bus stations across the region. The mayor of Greater Manchester is consulting on a ‘Good Employment Charter’, which ‘aims to help employers reach excellent employment standards and become more successful as a result’; and 130 catering businesses have agreed to replace plastic with paper straws to ‘contribute towards the Mayor’s aim of a plastic-free Greater Manchester by 2020 and supporting the wider Green City Region’ (Greater Manchester). The mayor of WMCA is collaborating with Business in the Community and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development to introduce a non-binding ‘workplace wellbeing commitment’, ‘based on the Public Health England Workplace Wellbeing Charter national standard that provides employers with a structured approach to workplace health and wellbeing’.

Lastly, mayors have also pursued international ‘ambassadorial’ initiatives (Gains, 2016). This type of activity has been most pronounced in Tees Valley, which has prioritised investment-led growth to a greater extent than other MCAs, but it is also found elsewhere: examples include trade missions to Korea (Tees Valley) and China (Greater Manchester), and participating in trade fairs in the USA (WECA). These initiatives build trust amongst the local business sector, whilst establishing awareness of the metro-mayors amongst investors – answering the common question of ‘who to call’ if a business decides to invest in the locality.

Following the money: Formal powers and grant coalitions

The data above indicate that metro-mayors have made broad uses of generative power in their first 18 months in office. But the document analysis also indicated that institutional and resource power remain critical to metro-mayors’ operations: examples of this are provided below. This too aligns with the previous literature. Sotarauta and Beer (2017) list 15 ‘processes and capacities’ that empower place leadership, and 20 ‘characteristics of leaders’. Of these, four and seven respectively feature institutional or resource power: in short, generative and resource power are not easily distinguished. This points to the conjecture that generative power cannot supplant resource and institutional power to any significant degree, and may even be dependent upon it. That conclusion would confirm previous empirical findings that generative power does not extend an organisation’s ‘capacity to govern’ unless it is backed in some way by legal, regulatory or financial capacity (Heidbreder, 2015; Marshall et al., 2002; Nelles et al., 2018; Raikes, 2017; Wilson and Gallagher, 2013).

The continued significance of institutional and resource power in the English MCAs is also in line with the idea that ‘slack resources’ (Beer and Clower, 2014) are critical to place leadership. The availability of resources (principally funding and officer time) is particularly critical for a new political institution. The metro-mayors face a steep challenge to establish institutional legitimacy. This requires them rapidly to develop profile and awareness of their role, amongst their electorate, the government, stakeholders and private actors. Key to the success of each of these is the presence of ‘slack resources’ within a region: ‘leadership is a demanding task, and time and effort are needed both to lead effectively and to build coalitions of individuals that can drive change and deliver stable leadership’ (Beer and Clower, 2014: 17). In the English context, this translates into MCAs building up bureaucratic capacity: strong teams that may deliver few services directly but are instrumental in growing an effective system of local governance.

Hard powers in old England

The analysis of MCA documentation indicated that a large quantity of their activity to date has concerned the distribution of the grant monies that formed part of their devolution deals. Many commentators have downplayed the extent of devolution of power to MCAs, suggesting that the powers available to them are negligible and/or lacking in critical components (Hambleton, 2017; Pike et al., 2016; Richards and Smith, 2015; Tomaney, 2016). For instance, the Adult Education Budget has been devolved, but the 19+ apprenticeships budget has not. Though most local transport funding has been devolved, trunk road provision has not, and capital funding for housing has been only partially devolved in some areas.

In contrast, relatively substantial funds for economic development-related activity are available to MCAs: each individual MCA’s budget is in the low hundreds of millions of pounds annually, including a general ‘investment grant’ and most local transport funding (Sandford, 2019). This is a small amount in comparative terms (Hambleton, 2017; Jeffrey, 2017; Slack, 2017), but it is sufficient to enable some local influence. It also compares favourably with the resources available to previous generations of English devolution, in which no spending programmes at all were made available to locally-controlled institutions. Alongside the investment grant, MCAs have very close relations with Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). They are able to distribute resources jointly in line with local growth priorities, acting in practice as a single institution and pooling several funding sources.

This has led many metro-mayors to stress infrastructure and investment plans in their communications. CPCA’s 2019–2020 Business Plan includes 12 key aims, of which 10 relate to new or improved transport infrastructure. Tees Valley has spent £40 million buying its local airport. Grants of housing funds have been made to local developers in Greater Manchester, CPCA and WECA. Liverpool has proposed to reduce tolls on the Mersey road tunnel, and the metro-mayor in Greater Manchester has reduced tram fares for under-18s. WMCA has committed £250 million to a tram extension in Wolverhampton. CPCA will establish a ‘Health and Care Sector Progression Academy’, using £5 million of a work and health support grant. WECA agreed £10 million for research into ultra-low emissions vehicles at the University of Bath.

The availability of funding resources permits MCAs to pursue ‘quick win’ policies, making use of their ability to integrate or redirect local budgets in response to policy concerns. This too contributes to enhancing their institutional legitimacy. Examples include Greater Manchester recycling underspends in a number of areas into an expansion of its apprenticeship funding, and CPCA saving a number of local bus routes from closure in the short term. Liverpool has negotiated the use of bus tickets to contribute to funding for food banks. Greater Manchester has begun work on mental health support for people within the criminal justice system, so that ‘vulnerable individuals affected by issues such as mental ill health, homelessness, or learning disabilities, are helped to access appropriate support as soon as possible’.

Government has also encouraged MCAs to bid for national funding schemes, in the manner of a conventional local authority; and they advertise their success in doing so. Examples include £9.6 million for rough sleeping (WMCA); £12.5m for housing (Tees Valley); and over £100m funding for a development corporation (Tees Valley), for the 2022 Commonwealth Games (WMCA) and for piloting the use of 5G communications (WMCA, WECA). Greater Manchester established a ‘culture and social impact fund’, following the receipt of £7 million from the Arts Council. Distributing these sums of money carries significant local influence in terms of delivering outcomes, contributing to institutional legitimacy.

Reverticalisation

Local institutions giving a relatively high priority to distributing central grants are naturally vulnerable, in terms of their functions, to swings in central policy. Eckersley (2017: 81) notes that ‘the vertical context within which sub-national bodies operate is likely to shape their capacity to achieve policy objectives’. UK policy on growth, productivity, innovation and infrastructure in 2017–2018 signalled a push towards ‘reverticalisation’ (Capano et al., 2015: 314). This can refer to the outright recentralisation of responsibilities, or to a new central policy and/or resource commitment that dwarfs the resources available to the local generative leader. For instance, the UK’s 2017 Autumn Budget and a second West Midlands devolution deal decentralised extra funding to the MCAs. A total of £850 million in ‘Transforming Cities’ funding has been allocated on a per capita basis amongst the six MCAs. Greater Manchester and WMCA are to pilot ‘local industrial strategies’. The West Midlands deal includes between 11 and 15 new streams of funding, totalling £320 million in additional grant money. These developments hint that central policy-makers see MCAs as the local delivery partner of choice for central economic interventions.

Where grant-making dominates generative power, but reverticalisation remains a perennial threat, MCAs face an incentive to develop into ‘grant coalitions’. In contrast to the relatively autonomous position of ‘growth coalitions’, this term captures an institution targeting its limited capacity towards its relationship with central government, lobbying to obtain additional funds and extend its formal power (Bailey and Wood, 2017; Gains, 2016; Moran et al., 2018). This calls to mind a common characterisation of partnership, in the UK local government world, as ‘the suspension of hostilities in pursuit of funds’. If generative power is indeed dependent upon the availability of resource and institutional power, it follows that, where power is reverticalised and sources of revenue become project-dependent, a supplicant relationship is the clearest route for a sub-state body to maximise impact.

Faced by the circumstances described, local leaders might therefore see themselves as enhancing their overall impact by prioritising resource over generative power, even at the expense of exercising policy discretion. This perspective would also account for the relative absence of ‘democratic innovation’ from MCA activities to date. It might be thought that metro-mayors could draw considerable generative power from a demonstrably engaged local electorate that was able to express support for particular policies. However, initiatives in this area have been the exception to the rule. Greater Manchester has established a ‘youth combined authority’, and has also (along with West Midlands) introduced monthly public mayoral question and answer sessions. But these are limited developments; the obvious inference is that the usefulness of democratic engagement pales into insignificance alongside the opportunities associated with resource power.

This finding – that metro-mayors do not act in accordance with the idea that generative power can fill any gap between powers and expectations – has international implications for jurisdictional design. A broader evaluation of metro-mayors’ outputs (as required in due course by the devolution deals) would provide stronger evidence to confirm, or otherwise, that a jurisdictional design that depends on generative power is unlikely to achieve the range and significance of outcomes available via resource and institutional power.

Conclusion

This article contributes to the study of sub-national governance structures by finding that policy initiatives pursued by sub-national governments in England can be classified according to the categories of power identified in the literature on governance and leadership. These findings enable the broad categories of power identified by scholars to be fleshed out, helping to address the question of whether there exists an identifiable phenomenon of ‘generative power’– detached and distinct from institutional and resource power. Debate over sub-national governance in England has long relied tacitly upon the claim that ‘generative power’ extends the local ‘capacity to govern’. The findings of the article suggest that this case is unproven at best. The metro-mayors’ priorities indicate that generative power has not supplanted formal and funding powers. They are at least as interested in determining ‘who gets what, when, where and how’ as they are in ‘generative power’– suggesting that the idea of generative power as an alternative to institutional power may appeal more to intuition than to practice.

This conclusion is in line with more recent developments in governance theory, which suggest that the significance of formal power was underestimated by earlier scholars (Capano et al., 2015; Davies, 2011; Stoker, 2011) and that state power remains crucial to achieving policy outcomes (Nelles et al., 2018; Sotarauta and Beer 2017; Stoker, 2011). These findings suggest that jurisdictional and institutional design changes, seeking to strengthen sub-national governments, should not expect generative power to compensate for limited transfers of institutional and resource power: an important lesson in an age when devolution of power is popular and generative power is seen as one solution to ‘generational challenges’ such as climate change.

The data from this study are not comprehensive: a fuller picture will be available from the performance evaluations of MCAs expected in the next few years. These may show that generative power simply takes time to develop: by contrast, grant funding can be distributed quickly and easily. Alternatively, they may demonstrate an association between the presence of generative power and institutional power. It is conceivable that, far from being a substitute for formal powers, generative power may accrue more readily where greater formal power is present. At a seminar between UK and USA mayors held by the Centre for Cities in December 2017, American mayors were ‘astonished’ at the lack of ‘fiscal and regulatory’ powers available to UK mayors. But at the same time, they described themselves as ‘leaders of their place’, with a ‘wider civic leadership role’ based on a formal core of powers (Jeffrey, 2017). These two perspectives were complementary, rather than representing opposing approaches to sub-state governing. In the context of England, this would lead us to expect Greater Manchester – which has substantially more institutional and resource power than other MCAs – to demonstrate more evidence of the use of generative power than other areas in the medium term. But at this stage, there are limited signs from the evidence from England that generative power can transcend the institutional inheritance of a local ‘place leader’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organisers and respondents, and attendees, at a number of seminars in late 2017 at which I presented ideas that led to this article: in particular Nicola Headlam, Andy Mycock, Arianna Giovannini and Les Budd. Thanks also to Sarah Ayres and Matt Flinders for comments on (very) early drafts; and to the editors of Urban Studies and two anonymous referees for extremely helpful suggestions.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mark Sandford

References

Ayres

(2017) Assessing the impact of informal governance on political innovation. Public Management Review 19(1): 90–107.

Ayres

Sandford

Coombes

(2017) Policy-making ‘front’ and ‘back’ stage: Assessing the implications for effectiveness and democracy. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(4): 861–876.

Bailey

Wood

(2017) The metagovernance of English devolution. Local Government Studies 43(6): 966–991.

Beel

Jones

Rees Jones

, et al. (2017) Connected growth: Developing a framework to drive inclusive growth across a city-region. Local Economy 32(6): 565–575.

Beer

Clower

(2014) Mobilising leadership in cities and regions. Regional Studies, Regional Science 1(1): 5–20.

Bennister

Worthy

Stafford

(2017) Rebels as local leaders: The mayoralties of Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone compared. Unpublished paper.

Bentley

Bailey

Shutt

(2017) Leadership and systems of governance: The constraints on the scope for leadership of place-based development in sub-national territories. Regional Studies 51(2): 194–209.

Blakeley

(2017) Metro-mayor elections: A new type of second-order election? SPERI Blog, 4 May. Available at: http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/05/04/metro-mayor-elections-a-new-type-of-second-order-election/ (accessed 27 April 2018).

Capano

Howlett

Ramesh

(2015) Bringing governments back in: Governance and governing in comparative policy analysis. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 17(4): 311–321.

10.

Collinge

Gibney

(2010) Connecting place, policy and leadership. Policy Studies 31(4): 379–391.

11.

Dahl

(1957) The concept of power. Behavioural Science 2: 201–215.

12.

Davies

(2011) Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. Bristol: Policy Press.

13.

Dearlove

(1973) The Politics of Policy in Local Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Eckersley

(2017) A new framework for understanding subnational policy-making and local choice. Policy Studies 38(1): 76–90.

15.

Etherington

Jones

(2017) Re-stating the post-political: Depoliticisation, social inequalities and city-region growth. Environment and Planning A 50(1): 51–72.

16.

Fai

Tomlinson

(2018) Local enterprise partnerships: Place-based industrial strategy advocates. In: Fai

(ed.) Place-Based Perspectives on the UK’s Industrial Strategy. Bath: University of Bath, pp. 53–61.

17.

Fenwick

Elcock

(2014) Elected mayors: Leading locally? Local Government Studies 40(4): 581–599.

18.

Gains

(2016) Metro mayors: Devolution, democracy and the importance of getting the ‘Devo Manc’ design right. Representation 51(4): 425–437.

19.

Greasley

Stoker

(2008) Mayors and urban governance: Developing a facilitative leadership style. Public Administration Review 68(4): 722–730.

20.

Hambleton

(2015) Place-based leadership: A new perspective on urban regeneration. Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal 9(1): 10–24.

21.

Hambleton

(2016) Leading the Inclusive City. Bristol: Policy Press.

22.

Hambleton

(2017) The super-centralisation of the English state – why we need to move beyond the devolution deception. Local Economy 32(1): 3–13.

23.

Hambleton

Sweeting

(2014) Innovation in urban political leadership: Reflections on the introduction of a directly-elected mayor in Bristol, UK. Public Money and Management 34(5): 315–322.

24.

Harding

(1991) The rise of urban growth coalitions, UK-style? Environment and Planning C 9: 295–317.

25.

Heidbreder

(2015) Governance in the European Union: A policy analysis of the attempts to raise legitimacy through civil society participation. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 17(4): 359–377.

26.

Hooghe

Marks

(2016) Community, Scale and Regional Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

27.

Horlings

Collinge

Gibney

(2017) Relational knowledge leadership and local economic development. Local Economy 32(2): 95–109.

28.

Horlings

Roep

Wellbrock

(2018) The role of leadership in place-based development and building institutional arrangements. Local Economy 33(3): 245–268.

29.

iUrban (2016) Enabling Sustainable City Competitiveness Through Distributed Urban Leadership. Rotterdam: European Centre for Comparative Urban Research.

30.

Jayne

(2011) From actor to avatar: The place of mayors in theories of urban governance. Geography Compass 5(11): 801–810.

31.

Jeffrey

(2017) Five reflections from our international metro mayors’ summit. Centre for Cities Blog. Available at: http://www.centreforcities.org/blog/5-reflections-international-metro-mayors-summit/ (accessed 27 April 2018).

32.

John

Cole

(1999) Political leadership in the new urban governance: Britain and France compared. Local Government Studies 25(4): 98–115.

33.

Kenealy

(2016) A tale of one city: The Devo Manc deal and its implications for English devolution. Political Quarterly 87(4): 572–581.

34.

Lent

Studdert

(2018) A Changemaking Vision for Local Government. London: New Local Government Network (NLGN).

35.

Logan

Molotch

(1987) Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

36.

Lowndes

Lempriere

(2018) Understanding variation in processes of institutional formation. Political Studies 66(1): 226–244.

37.

Lukes

(1976) Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan.

38.

Marshall

Glasson

Headicar

(eds) (2002) Contemporary Issues in Regional Planning. Aldershot: Ashgate.

39.

Martin

Pike

Tyler

, et al. (2015) Spatially Balancing the UK Economy: The Need for a New Policy Model. Seaford: Regional Studies Association.

40.

Moran

Tomaney

Williams

(2018) Territory and power in England: The political economy of Manchester and beyond. In: Kenny

Paun

MacLean

(eds) Governing England. London: British Academy, pp. 189–206.

41.

Nelles

Gross

Kennedy

(2018) The role of governance networks in building metropolitan scale. Territory, Politics, Governance 6(2): 159–181.

42.

Pierre

Peters

(2000) Governance, Politics and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

43.

Pike

Kempton

Marlow

, et al. (2016) Decentralisation: Issues, Principles and Practice. Newcastle: Newcastle University Press.

44.

Raikes

(2017) England’s New Leaders: How Mayors can Transform their Cities. Manchester: IPPR North.

45.

Rhodes

(1988) Beyond Westminster and Whitehall. London: HarperCollins.

46.

Richards

Smith

(2015) Devolution in England, the British political tradition and the absence of consultation, consensus and consideration. Representation 51(4): 385–401.

47.

Sandford

(2005) The New Governance of the English Regions. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

48.

Sandford

(2017) Signing up to devolution: The prevalence of contract over governance in English devolution policy. Regional and Federal Studies 27(1): 63–82.

49.

Sandford

(2019) Money talks: The finances of combined authorities. Local Economy 34(2): 106–122.

50.

Skelcher

(2000) Changing images of the state: Overloaded, hollowed-out, congested. Public Policy and Administration 15(3): 3–19.

51.

Slack

(2017) How Much Local Fiscal Autonomy Do Cities Have? A Comparison of Eight Cities around the World. Toronto: Institute on Municipal Finance & Government (IMFG).

52.

Sotarauta

(2016) Leadership and the City: Power, Strategy and Networks in the Making of Knowledge Cities. Abingdon: Routledge.

53.

Sotarauta

Beer

(2017) Governance, agency and place leadership: Lessons from a cross national analysis. Regional Studies 51(2): 210–223.

54.

Stoker

(1995) Regime theory and urban politics. In: Judge

Stoker

Wolman

(eds) Theories of Urban Politics. London: Sage, pp. 54–71.

55.

Stoker

(2011) Was local governance such a good idea? A global comparative perspective. Public Administration 89(1): 15–31.

56.

Stone

(1980) Systemic power and community decision making: A restatement of stratification theory. American Political Science Review 74(4): 978–990.

57.

Sweeting

Hambleton

(2017) Mayoral governance in Bristol: Has it made a difference? In: Sweeting

(ed.) Directly Elected Mayors in Urban Governance. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 19–34.

58.

Tees Valley Mayor (n.d.) Tees Valley Mayor launches campaign to secure protected status for Teesside’s world famous parmo. Available at: https://teesvalley-ca.gov.uk/tees-valley-mayor-launches-campaign-secure-protected-status-teessides-world-famous-parmo/ (accessed 12 August 2019).

59.

Tomaney

(2016) The limits of devolution: Localism, economics and post-democracy. Political Quarterly 87(4): 546–552.

60.

Tomaney

O’Brien

Pike

, et al. (2017) Metro-mayors: Claims and evidence. CURDS Blog. Available at: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/curds/2017/04/04/metro-mayors-claims-and-evidence/ (accessed 27 April 2018).

61.

Wilson

Gallagher

(2013) Community Works: Putting Work, Skills and Enterprise at the Heart of Community Budgets. London: Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI).