Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

In this paper I present an ex post review of the failure of mobile private investment to contribute to the formation of competitive industry agglomerations in the UK's old industrial regions. The UK's industrial districts were the inspiration for the concept of external economies with which we understand the competitiveness of agglomerations of economic activity. Yet long-standing disarticulation between UK government inward investment, regional, industrial, and technology policy has ensured that mobile investment (notably, but not exclusively, foreign direct investment) has rarely contributed to the genesis of competitive agglomerations of new economic activity. Up until the 1980s the nature of mobile investment actually offered considerable scope for successive UK governments to leverage on synergies between it and established industry specialisms in the formation of viable new agglomerations of economic activity. Since the 1980s the difficulties of creating synergies between new mobile and existing industry arguably have increased, leaving new regional economic strategies as little more than wishful thinking regarding the formation of new agglomerations of knowledge-based economic activity.

In November 2005 the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration announced a bold new initiative—Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development (known as WIRED). In its first iteration the WIRED initiative awarded thirteen three-year regional planning and development grants to assist regions in integrating their workforce and economic development systems to better serve emerging technologies and high employment growth sectors. In this paper I discuss the WIRED initiative as a model for federal involvement in regional economic development. Despite a sound basis in regional development theory, the implementation of WIRED fell short of its original goals that, in many cases, stymied regional attempts at innovation. The difficulties experienced by first-generation WIRED recipients led to a stark revision of the federal WIRED concept and a reversion to more traditional workforce development approaches. To be truly effective, future federal endeavors in regional economic development must overcome the persistent institutional divisions, legal impediments, and political pressures that work contrary to the desired goal of a flexible and competitive regional development strategy.

With this study we aim to develop a theoretical understanding and to assess policy implications of cluster development in the context of a knowledge-driven, globalizing Asian economy. We will examine both the strengths and the limitations of recent biotechnology cluster policies in South Korea and Singapore. We argue that the two states share similar experiences in terms of the state's proactive role as a cluster creator, but that they have promoted biotechnology industry clusters in contrasting ways due to different national politics and political institutions. South Korea places more emphasis on endogenous capabilities, while Singapore highlights the importance of exogenous capabilities in biotechnology cluster development. By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of these contrasting cluster policies, we evaluate the long-standing debate between endogenism and exogenism in the study of regional development. Instead of these dualistic approaches, we employ a global production network analytical lens for understanding the dynamic interactions between localized growth factors (endogenous) and globalizing external factors (exogenous) in the context of Asian biotechnology cluster development. We adopt a multipart strategy that includes archives, surveys, in-depth interviews, and secondary source data collection in order to enhance the validity and reliability of the data.

Combining insights from the theory of fields to markets and recent geographic literature on regional innovation, I conceptualize regional industry building as a contested process of market building involving initiatives of both economic actors and political actors in intertwined governmental fields and organizational fields. Market building entails the contribution of knowledge brokers capable of bridging the gap between the local industrial community and global leaders. Moreover, it requires the institutionalization of a stable governance structure to enable the rise of productivity-enhancing new entrepreneurship, especially to minimize ‘unproductive’ endeavors of technological entrepreneurs in fighting against powerful incumbents and reactionary institutions. From a policy perspective, regional industry building entails not only policies facilitating the pooling of glocal knowledge brokers at the regional scale, but also institutional reform and political transformation in the national arena, especially in an emerging market economy.

In this paper we examine the role of the Korean government in creating university – industry linkages and in promoting the role of universities as knowledge providers in regional innovation systems. We investigate the different types of universities' roles in the capital region of Seoul and in the noncapital regions. We argue that government policy is the main determinant that drives Korean universities to play the role of knowledge provider for industrial innovation. This policy has also brought about regional differences in the way universities participate in innovation activities in the capital region and outside the capital region. In the Korean context, universities in noncapital regions act as a backbone for creating and managing regional innovation networks as well as a close and easily accessible knowledge provider to local industry. However, universities in the capital region play the role of a close knowledge provider only to local industry, while corporate research and development centres are the key players in developing and managing innovation networks in the capital region. To arrive at our conclusions we use social networks analysis and government document analysis to demonstrate the structure of innovation networks and to analyze two types of universities' roles in the regional innovation networks of four Korean industrial clusters.

The biotech industry is considered to be the next growth engine by many policy makers and economic development scholars. However, our understanding of how the biotech industry evolves and grows is still quite limited. In this study we examine how the industry began and grew, on the basis of a case study and statistical analysis. A case study of the Raleigh–Durham area reveals that the region was fortunate to have strong political leadership accompanied by scientific, industrial, and entrepreneurial assets that set off the initial spark of the biotech growth in the region. In the study's statistical analysis we use the tripod approach to examine the growth of the biotech sector. The results show that the complex interplay of knowledge creation, commercialization, and retention factors determines the growth path of the biotech industry.

Not enough has been written about the import, adaptation, and application of urban environmental and planning policies from abroad into the United States. Even less has been written about the voluntary cross-national transfer and application of environmental policies by American subnational actors and institutions. It is our intent to begin redressing this by discussing the transfer of urban environmental and planning policies from Germany to the United States during the early part of the 21st century. This discussion is informed by data drawn from governmental reports and planning statements and over thirty-five interviews with US urban environmental and planning practitioners operating in Germany and the United States. What we discover is that, unlike more rational models of policy transfer, the voluntary importation of environmental and planning policies into the US is seldom a problem-focused, goal-oriented process. Rather, what we find is that a better depiction of the transfer and adoption process is of a relatively anarchic situation. This appears to occur due to a range of institutional and cultural filters that predispose American policy makers against gathering (and using) information and experiences from abroad. We find that this filtering process tends to encourage policy makers to discount (or reject outright) the usefulness of overseas models and that, when they do engage in this process, any information gathered appears to be based less upon well-researched and analyzed data than embedded ‘tacit’ knowledge.

In this paper I examine local political leadership in Spain. Spanish mayors are examples of ‘strong mayors’—that is, they have considerable executive authority and discretion in municipal affairs. Yet little detailed research exists on the formal and informal institutional bases of their position. I fill this gap by presenting empirical research on two Spanish municipalities. Using a new institutionalist theoretical perspective, I examine the rules around the appointment and removal of the mayor, the composition of the cabinet, the role of the full council, and the conventions around the role of the mayor in the municipality. Legal powers, a culture of individualised leadership, and councillor representation based on support for the party are all important for maintaining the mayor's position. Some formal rules around the mayor in the case-study municipalities are ‘latent’—that is, they exist but are not used.

In this paper we propose an inquiry into the patterns of regional specialisation and industrial concentration in Romania during its transition to a market economy (1990–2004). Following an econometric modelling-based approach we demonstrate that the changes in these patterns have been influenced to a large extent by election cycles, and more precisely by changes in the economic policy options determined by the ‘colour’ of each corresponding government. These findings have an important significance for the postaccession period, suggesting the need for decisions on economic structures to be carefully monitored when a new election cycle is approaching, in order to avoid possible negative consequences for efficiency and integration in EU structures.

This existing literature on the Scottish devolution process tends to stress the unique aspects of the case. I make a contribution to this literature by placing the insights that have emerged in case-study research within the context of more general theorising. Combining concepts found in the literature on political legitimacy with intuitions derived from veto player theory, I provide a structured and theoretically grounded framework of devolution decisions and nondecisions. This approach helps to place the process that eventually led to the creation of a Scottish Parliament in a wider context.

In this paper we investigate the impact of the implementation of EU programmes on substate actors, and more specifically regional ones. We focus on the case of the INTERREG cross-border initiative in France and Spain between 2000 and 2003, and whether INTERREG succeeded in empowering regional governments and local authorities as it initially claimed to. Our analysis puts to the fore that this programme has not evolved from being ‘a policy for the regions to a policy by the regions' as many expected, but that its implementation rather reveals a wide range of configurations. Indeed, the execution of INTERREG facilitated the transition from a state-centric scheme to a regionalised one only in those territories where a previous decentralisation policy had been realised at the domestic level and where a consistent regional leadership had emerged during earlier versions of INTERREG.