New regions in the periphery: Agency and politics in shaping the governance of regional development in the Scotland–England border region

David Clelland

Local Economy, 2022, vol. 37, issue 6, 421-439

Abstract: The restructuring of sub-national economic governance has been one response to persistent regional inequalities; in the United Kingdom, this has entailed a rescaling of strategic economic governance around city-regions. The variety of ‘left behind’ places, however, also includes peripheral and non-urban regions, prompting actors across different scales to seek arrangements for those places outside the city-regional paradigm. This paper provides insights into these processes through tracing the emergence of two new and overlapping spaces of governance in the largely rural South of Scotland, and across a larger area also including the far North of England. While driven by top-down priorities of the centre, new spaces are created through political processes contested across multiple scales, layered onto existing arrangements. These episodes demonstrate how regional actors exercise agency in shaping governance arrangements by articulating regional problems, and proposed responses, with political concerns of the centre. They also indicate the potential for dominant approaches, based on city-regional imaginaries, to be challenged. New regions offer at least the potential for actors in the periphery to secure resources for place-based development, within a fragmented and competitive landscape. They may however prove to be transient, requiring ongoing coupling of regional and central interests to be maintained.

Keywords: regional development; regions; governance; rescaling; peripheral; agency; politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02690942231169519 (text/html)

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:sae:loceco:v:37:y:2022:i:6:p:421-439

DOI: 10.1177/02690942231169519

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Local Economy from London South Bank University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().