Donald J. Savoie

Regional development theories & their application

Throughout the world today former nation-states, as disparate as Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Canada, have either disintegrated or threaten to splinter into regions. The conflicts are economic, social, ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, and cultural. Higgins and Savoie analyze the reasons for these conflicts and show why attempts to eliminate regional disparities within nations have been largely unsuccessful. This volume is a highly readable, comprehensive survey of the literature and current debates in the fields of regional economics, development, policy, and planning.

Regional Development Policy

Among countries with distinctly regionalized economic and political structures, Australia is virtually unique in its degree of indifference to regional problems and policies, both within the academic community and among the general public. To an economist brought up in Canada, it seems extraordinary that highly respected surveys of the Australian economy and Australian economic development, published since World War II, should contain not one word about regional problems, regional development, or regional policy.1 Regional policy is almost never a major campaign issue. It is seldom debated in Parliament, or discussed on television or in the press, although the media allocate more time and space to economic and social issues in Australia than in most countries.

Reforming the Expenditure Budget Process: The Canadian Experience

During the past twenty years the government of Canada has introduced three distinct approaches to managing its expenditure budget. The approaches were all introduced with considerable fanfare and also with the promise that they would enable the government to finally get a firm handle on its expenditure budget. This paper looks at the three approaches and outlines their most important features. The paper also presents the reasons that led to the downfall of both the Program Planning Budgeting System (PPBS) and the Policy and Expenditure Management System (PEMS). The paper goes on to argue that the recently introduced approach—labeled the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC)—is also unlikely to meet expectations. It also provides an historical context for understanding why each particular approach was adopted.

Rural redevelopment in Canada: the case of northeast New Brunswick

Abstract Among the countries classified by the United Nations as industrialized market economies, Canada is surely one of the most highly regionalized and its economy is accordingly one of the most badly fragmented. The rural areas are particularly vulnerable and economic disparities between urban and rural regions have traditionally been extremely pronounced. The economies of some rural areas have economic structural deficiencies more akin to those found in Third World countries than as part of a well-integrated highly developed economy such as Canadas. One such area is northeast New Brunswick. In the 1960s, the Canadian government launched a series of ambitious development measures for selected rural areas. Early on, northeast New Brunswick was identified as a high priority area and costly initiatives to promote development were put in place over a 20 year period. This paper reports on these efforts. It also attempts to determine their success and concludes with an assessment of why the efforts may not have been as successful as originally envisaged.

Administering the Summit from a Canadian Perspective

Writing in 1970, Canadian journalist Walter Stewart argued that the prime minister was emerging as the ‘single dominant force in government’ in Canada.1 He went on to call Pierre Trudeau, then Canadian Prime Minister, Canada’s ‘President’. A keen student of Canadian politics later suggested that Canada ‘seems to have created a presidential system without its congressional advantages’.2 There is no reason to believe that the position and influence of the prime minister have attenuated in recent years. Indeed, no one would even attempt now to make the case that the prime minister is still ‘first among equals’ in Cabinet. It is important to bear in mind, however, that though the Canadian prime minister in most circumstances can dominate his Cabinet and the federal government’s political and policy agenda, there are still a number of checks on his influence and power. Those checks and balances may have been declining in recent years, but they are still present.

Regional Economic Development Policies and Programs in the United States

This chapter presents a critical review of the evolution of federal regional development policies in the United States. Virtually all government policies and programs have differential geographic outcomes, but, typically, the spatial impacts are either not the main concern, or they are distributed according to pork barrel political criteria. The focus here is on the more salient activities of agencies specifically created to promote regional development in economically lagging regions. The year 1965 represents a watershed in this regard. At that time Congress established the Economic Development Administration, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and a number of other multistate regional development commissions as part of President Johnson’s Great Society program. In so doing, the federal government assumed an unprecedented degree of responsibility for ameliorating spatial structural problems on a national scale. For various reasons that will be considered, this commitment has waned over the years. Nevertheless, there are grounds for believing that regional policy may once again enjoy a revival at the federal level. Be that as it may, there is still a great deal that state and local governments and other countries can learn from the failures and successes of U.S. experience over the past two decades.

La bureaucratie représentative: une perspective régionale

Students of Canadian politics and public policy have produced numerous studies on the importance of regionalism in Canadian politics. A wealth of essays now exists on regional political culture and numerous suggestions have been put forward to make our national political institutions more regionally sensitive. One institution—the federal public service—has been virtually ignored in this context. Yet many now recognize the considerable influence the federal public service has on the governments policy-making process. With the aid of a survey, this article assesses if senior federal officials themselves view the governments policy-making process as centralized or decentralized. The survey also seeks to assess the importance senior federal public servants attach to regional economic circumstances in policy-making. The survey is broken down on a regional basis.

Social Movements and Europeanization

Donatella della Porta and Manuale Caiani have written an interesting monograph on social movements and Europeanisation. The book is based on a rich compilation of material collected in the so-called Europub project – a comparative study of political mobilisation and communication in the European public sphere and survey material collected at the First European Social Forum in Florence in 2002. Fruitfully combining methods such as surveys, text analysis, newspaper analysis and interviews with relevant actors, the authors convincingly show that on the one hand the social movement sector is not yet very much involved with European politics, while on the other hand its involvement is growing and a European social movement sector is developing gradually. The central question of the monograph concerns the extent to which the social movement sector and civil society are Europeanising. The authors observe that politics in Europe steadily Europeanise, that is, become more and more suprastatal – although not in equal measures for every policy domain. They interpret this process of Europeanisation as a special case of globalisation and wonder how the social movement sector and civil society react to this transition of Europe into a multilevel polity. They investigate whether what they coin as ‘Europeanisation from below’ is taking place in response to Europeanisation at the top. Such Europeanisation from below is reflected in two different multilevel strategies on the part of social movements: domestication of collective action, where pressure on national governments is used to challenge EU politics; and externalisation, that is, protests at the EU level with the aim of changing national policies. Two separate chapters of the book describe these two strategies and present examples and evidence illustrating the Europeanisation of movement sector and civil society in response to the Europeanisation of politics. The evidence presented demonstrates how interactions at the European level intensify and produce organisational structures and identities at the European level. Gradually, a European social movement emerges addressing EU politics and policies, although in many respects the movement is still weak. In line with what seems to be a more general trend in the social movement sector this European social movement emerges in the form of loose networks of organisations and individuals interwoven in flexible structures with identities that are tolerant of difference. This tendency to move towards European institutions is cognitively driven by a growing acknowledgement of the increasing competences of the EU. At the same time, evidence is presented which shows that the cognitive processes are accompanied by relational ones. Strategies of domestication and externalisation alike have intensified the interactions between national and local West European Politics, Vol. 33, No. 2, 399–414, March 2010

All the Difference: A Development Economist's Quest@@@Equity and Efficiency in Economic Development: Essays in Honour of Benjamin Higgins

He goes on to tell the story of his advisory missions to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Higgins weaves anecdotal accounts of his adventures in these regions, and gives his personal reactions to these environments along with analysis of the development efforts in which he participated. He explains how professional thinking about economic and social development evolved as experience and knowledge accumulated. The book also includes accounts of the authors experiences with, and reactions to, a variety of multicultural and bilateral aid agencies, thus providing an intimate picture of their operation. In his final chapter Higgins sums up his own views on the current state of economic development, development economics, economics in general, and the role of political and cultural factors in the development process.

Integration of National and Regional Policy

The countries lumped together as “less developed,” or “Third World,” differ widely in level and pattern of development, structure of their economies, degree of regional and technological dualism, culture, and ideologies. Regional policies differ accordingly. However, there is one feature of economic and social policy in Third World countries that unites them and distinguishes them from the “industrialized market economies,” taken as a group: They have official and formal national development plans. Reducing regional disparities is sometimes an objective of regional policy; it is never the be-all and end-all of regional policy. Rather, regional policy and planning are viewed as integral parts of national strategies for enhancing the economic and social welfare of national societies as a whole. Moreover, since the mid-1960s, more and more less developed countries (LDCs) have turned to regional policy and planning as the most effective technique for assembling national policies and plans for development.