A Critique in Search of a Corpus

Re‐visiting Governance and Re‐interpreting Urban Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID8963181
AuthorsKelly Ward (0000-0002-3810-0889, University of Manchester, corresponding author), Kevin G Ward
Year2000
Volume25
Issue2
Pages169-185
Publication date2000-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.0020-2754.2000.00169.x
OpenAlexW2011945996
LanguageEN
Citations received58
References cited59

One of the most profound changes of the last two decades has been in the form and the function of local government. Its role as part of the local state has been challenged through the re‐scaling and re‐configuration of many of its aims. This paper examines the growth of business sector involvement and the ascendancy of the partnership model in urban development, as part of an analysis of the changes and the continuities that stretch across the local government – local governance conceptualization of political relations. I start the paper with a discussion of the main issues in the local governance literature as a precursor to a commentary onImrie and Raco's (1999) recent paper, ‘How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom’. The wider literature is drawn upon to discuss some of the theoretical approaches used to analyse this much‐vaunted transformation and three key themes are used to structure the remainder of the paper. I argue that Imrie and Raco caricature the work of other academics in order to make their claims over omissions from the literature. In doing so, they ignore or under‐play how state restructuring and the logic of capital has often been the object of analysis, rather that the voluntarist incorporation of business élites into the local governing apparatus. Using empirical examples from three English cities I argue that while, on the one hand, their examples are revealing and serve to sensitize current debates around governance, the state and regulation, on the other hand, there is still a need to interpret these ‘local’ politics within a broader and more scale‐sensitive framework and in more abstract terms. This demands a clear distinction between local governance as a concept, and its investigation in an empirical way

Capital (architecture · Conceptualization · Corporate governance · Economic system · Economics · General partnership · Local government · Management · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Restructuring · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration · Public Policy and Administration Research · Urban Planning and Governance

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