Andrew E. G. Jonas

Governance and regulation in local environmental policy: the utility of a regime approach

Abstract In the study of environmental policy and sustainable urban development there has been an increasing emphasis upon notions of ‘the local’ as a key site of intervention. However, the rationale for this is rarely stated in policy terms and has barely been addressed from a theoretical perspective. In correcting what amounts to significant lacunae in the analysis of local environmental policy, we suggest that, in terms of both policy and discourse, ‘the environment’ is undergoing a process of governance rescaling within the state. Although this rescaling process can be understood as integral to the problem of social regulation in after-Fordism, it clearly also has important implications for the governance of local economies and the local form of environmental policy. Although the rescaling of environmental policy appears to be predominantly downwards (i.e. a process of localization), ‘the environment’ has become a particular object of regulation and focus of struggle at a variety of spatial scales. In order to understand the uneven development of local environmental policy making and sustainable development, it is necessary to examine the immediate, local contexts of governance and social regulation. Drawing upon work in political economy, we suggest that a ‘reconstructed urban regime theory’ approach offers a means of conceptualizing the form of local environmental policy and economic governance; at the same time it can make the necessary connections to regulatory processes operating at a variety of spatial scales.

Competitive city-regionalism as a politics of space: a critical reinterpretation of the new regionalism

This paper sets out a sympathetic critique of a series of writings that we refer to as new regionalist approaches to the city. We review the recent work on state restructuring/rescaling and the associated work on the new regionalism, on the one hand, and that on ‘global’ city-regions, on the other. We identify key points of overlap and divergence between these two literatures and suggest that each understates the role of class interests, political alliance formation, and conflicts around the management of collective consumption and social reproduction. We proceed to outline the framework of an alternative and complementary approach in which causal emphasis is placed on the shaping of subnational state geographies by actually existing struggles and strategies developed around particular geographies of public and private investment and collective consumption, and their associated state fiscal, electoral, and regulatory arrangements. We argue that working from this position we are better able to understand why the city-region continues to constitute a strategically vital arena for managing conflict and struggle in contemporary capitalism.

Local Labour Control Regimes: Uneven Development and the Social Regulation of Production

JONAS A. E. G. (1996) Local labour control regimes: uneven development and the social regulation of production, Reg. Studies 30, 323–338. The apparent demise of Fordist consensus-seeking institutions of labour regulation raises questions concerning which, if any, forms of labour market governance will dominate localities in the future. Without providing the answers for these questions, this paper addresses at a theoretical level the social need for capital to foster reciprocities between places of production and sites of consumption and labour reproduction in local labour markets. This need emerges from a contradiction between, on the one hand, capitals abstract interest in the global exchange of labour power and, on the other hand, the concrete interest of particular capitals in the local context of that exchange. A local labour control regime amounts to a stable local institutional framework for accumulation and labour regulation constructed around local labour market reciprocities. Different factions ...

Urban development, collective consumption and the politics of metropolitan fragmentation

Abstract The territorial partition of the metropolis is a theme central to discussions of urban problems in the US. Metropolitan political fragmentation per se is far from understood, however. Theories of metropolitan political fragmentation have tended to emphasize interests in consumption to the neglect of matters of production. Moreover, the role of state managers tends to be marginalized in such theories. This paper situates an actual politics of metropolitan fragmentation in relation to the two dominant discourses of contemporary urban theory: the politics of local economic development and the politics of collective consumption. Consideration is paid to pressures for territorial organization emanating from coalitional forces that span the state-civil society boundary. These conceptual themes are examined concretely through a detailed study of post-war patterns of territorial organization in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio. While integration of the metropolitan area in terms of the provision of water and sewerage for local economic development projects has been a project of the metropolitan growth coalitions and the city of Columbus, that integration has only been possible to the extent that interests in collective consumption or, more specifically, in education, have been politically neutralized.

Region and place Regionalism in question

Territorial notions of place and region are being challenged by the relational viewpoint. Yet relational thinking often neglects to address questions of territory and territorial politics. This progress report examines some commonalities and differences between relational and territorial approaches to regions and regionalism. It considers the treatment of the state and territorial politics in the various literatures developing around the New Regionalism. The received distinction drawn between territorial and relational approaches could be rendered obsolete if critical attention were to be paid to matters of territory and territorial politics.

The New Urban Politics as a Politics of Carbon Control

The new urban politics (NUP) literature has helped to draw attention to a new generation of entrepreneurial urban regimes involved in the competition to attract investment to cities. Interurban competition often had negative environmental consequences for the urban living place. Yet knowledge of the environment was not very central to understanding the NUP. Entrepreneurial urban regimes today are struggling to deal with climate change and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon reduction strategies could have profound implications for interurban competition and the politics of urban development. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon urban polity—carbon control—and examines its potential ramifications for a new environmental politics of urban development (NEPUD). The NEPUD signals the growing centrality of carbon control in discourses, strategies and struggles around urban development. Using examples from cities in the US and Europe, the paper examines how these new environmental policy considerations are being mainstreamed in urban development politics. Alongside competitiveness, the management of carbon emissions represents a new yet at the same time contestable mode of calculation in urban governance.

A world of regionalisms? Towards a US-UK urban and regional policy framework comparison

In the last 30 years there have been a number of changes in the political and economic contexts in which urban and regional policy is delivered in the United States and the United Kingdom. In both countries understandings of urban policy have crystallized around the notion of the competitive city–region. Despite an apparent convergence of policy, national differences remain important in informing urban and regional policy debates and institutional frameworks in the US and UK. We draw on examples from the North West of England and Southern California to note the continuing significance of national and subnational differences in actual existing institutional and political developments at the urban and regional scales. In light of these differences, we argue that comparative analyses of new urban and regional policy frameworks need to recognize the role of the politics of space in shaping a world of regionalisms.

Unblocking the city? Growth pressures, collective provision, and the search for new spaces of governance in Greater Cambridge, England

A somewhat overlooked aspect of the geography of ‘after-Fordist’ regulation concerns the precise role of different branches of the state in managing tensions between local economic development and the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, the states reluctance to manage or spatially redistribute growth in the South East has resulted in localised pressures on housing markets, the land-use planning system, infrastructure, and the environment, intensifying struggles between progrowth and antigrowth factions in certain places. In this paper the authors examine conflicts arising from the rapid growth of new economic spaces in and around the Cambridge subregion and explore various attempts by different branches of the state and locally dependent factions of capital to overcome barriers to further growth within existing and proposed frameworks for territorial management. A key arena of conflict in this instance centres upon land-use planning and provision of infrastructure. The Cambridge ‘growth crisis’ raises a series of issues about the ability of interests claiming to represent nationally important city-regions to detach such places from their formative local and national modes of regulation.

Reimagining Berlin: World City, National Capital or Ordinary Place?

Globalization has had a dramatic effect on the way in which we understand the operation of urban systems. Cities - or their elites - have increasingly sought to redefine and reimagine themselves through place marketing in ways which allow them to compete in the global marketplace. The ‘exceptional’ case of Berlin is explored in the context of regional and global restructuring. Berlin has been at the centre of dramatic changes over the last decade and has been forced to reimagine itself in quite a different set of global understandings. A series of different - competing and sometimes complementary - imaginary Berlins are being constructed in the process of reinsertion into ‘normal’ capitalist urbanization. The relationships between property-led visions with Berlin at the heart of a wider Europe, visions of Berlin as a revived capital of a united Germany and the redefinition of Berlin as an ordinary place are considered. Each of these visions offers a different interpretation of Berlin. The paper critically assesses the extent to which it is possible to escape from pro-growth agendas in developing an urban future for the city and explores some of the implications of Berlin’s current development trajectory.

Rescaling and Regional Governance: The English Regional Development Agencies and the Environment

The establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in the English regions will bring about an important change in UK regional governance. A key area of contention and struggle is likely to occur over the contribution of the RDAs to sustainable development. Although the pursuit of sustainable development is a stated goal of the RDAs, in this paper we argue that this goal is likely to be compromised by tensions and contradictions emerging in the evolving new governance landscape of England. In terms of promoting sustainable-development policy, the regional scale of the UK state is becoming materially and discursively significant, and a particular focus of struggles around economic and environmental issues. These struggles strategically intersect with wider processes of reregulation and rescaling in the UK state. We not only consider the practical policy implications of integrating the economy and environment at the regional scale, but also analyse emerging tensions in regional governance in the light of processes of social reregulation and rescaling within the UK state. We argue that theoretical approaches to the latter need to incorporate the uneven process of rescaling and the contingent nature of regional state forms and institutions.