Joanie Willett

The Uneven Path of UK Devolution: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Regionalism in England – Cornwall and the North-East Compared

Within the context of the devolution process in England, Cornwall and the North-East stand out in contrasting comparison. The North-East was given the opportunity to vote for a regional assembly, which it rejected in 2004, while the strong popular movement for an assembly in Cornwall was ignored by central government. This is reflected in the literature on the English question and regionalism in the UK, which focuses on the example of the North-East, and largely overlooks the grassroots support in Cornwall and the opportunities for understanding regionalism that this could provide. In this article, we explore why this might be the case, developing a comparison between the two areas in the context of the campaigns for setting up directly elected assemblies. We look at the territorial status of the two areas, how the respective campaigns were organised, the types of group involved, the motives that were driving activists, and each regions political significance to Labour. We find central control of the political agenda to be a key issue behind the failure of English regionalism.

National identity and regional development: Cornwall and the campaign for Objective 1 funding

The politics of identity is important within regional and governance policy debates, becoming a mechanism for ‘filling in’ the democratic gaps left by the hollowing out of the state, with much discourse about constructing identities for governance purposes. This raises questions about the feasibility of processes of identity construction, and whether it starts from new, or builds on existing identities. We use the case study of the Cornish campaign for Objective 1 EU structural funding, engaging directly with modernist versus ethnosymbolist accounts of nationalism, to explore the binary between instrumental, constructed identities and more phenomenological accounts.

Cornwall's devolution deal: towards a more sustainable governance?

This article considers the devolution deal signed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in the summer of 2015. It asks if the deal constitutes a more sustainable approach to governance, concluding that while there are some factors that help to enhance sustainability, other areas urgently require more attention. These claims are made through an analysis of a model of sustainability which emphasises the importance of networks and feedback loops envisaging civil society as an adaptive organism. This helps to show that although power is significantly dispersed in some aspects of the ‘Cornwall Deal’, this latter does little to alter the highly centralised nature of governance across England, or provide spaces where local actors can feed back into central policy.

The Production of Place: Perception, Reality and the Politics of Becoming

This article uses critical political theories to engage with regional economic development as a site of exclusion, inequality and interwoven power relationships, which would benefit from theoretical analysis. It does this through the concept of lifestyle from regional development creative industries discourses and regional branding, considering how time operates in the narratives of place used to represent and promote a region to the outside world. Using Cornwall as a case study and an analysis informed by complexity theory, the article claims that regional narratives need to be understood not just for how they are produced and what they say, but also for the futures that they imply. It argues that while strategic development narratives need to be situated within an affective assemblage that resonates with popular perceptions of place, they also need to have a narrative that opens up spaces of possibility for future action and facilitates adaptation.