COMPARING CITY GOVERNANCE MODELS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: The Emergence of Shared, Visionary Leadership

Georgina Blakeley, Francisco Collado Campaña, Caroline Gray and Ángel Valencia Sáiz

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2025, vol. 49, issue 4, 815-834

Abstract: This article provides a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of the local political leadership of economic development policy. It is a small‐N comparative study examining two cities in England and two in Spain: Birmingham in the Midlands and Manchester in the north‐west of England, and Seville and Malaga, both in the southern region of Andalusia. Our analysis draws on the literature of political leadership styles informed by the typology of urban leadership developed by John and Cole in 1999. Our core purpose was to advance empirical knowledge of how local leadership styles affect the governance of economic development policy. We do so by identifying the decisive actors involved in the ecosystem of municipal economic development policy, the style of local political leader in each case and the impact of different local government systems in Spain and England on the governance of municipal economic development policy. Our findings point to the scope for further theoretical development of John and Cole's typology to fully capture a shared and collaborative leadership style which our research revealed as increasingly prevalent in local governance.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13325

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:49:y:2025:i:4:p:815-834

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is currently edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().