ABSTRACT
As Chapter 3 has demonstrated, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional development policy exhibits a strong tendency towards convergence and institutional isomorphism, such that regions across the world appear to be pursuing ‘identikit’ development strategies. This serial reproduction of ideas and strategies has been explained by the power of the discourse which unifies them – the discourse of competitiveness. The hegemonic status of competitiveness, coupled with its particular prescriptions for understanding and securing regional economic success and the transmission of its ideas by particular players and through key networks, plays a powerful role in propagating the sameness of ideas and approaches that is evident. However, Chapter 3 has also suggested that whilst there are strong pres-
sures for convergence around the discourse of competitiveness and the key policy levers and tools deemed essential to its delivery, this convergence in ‘talk’ may not necessarily result in convergence in decisions and actions. Indeed, the emergent cultural political economy (CPE) approach outlined in Chapter 2 points to the dangers of assuming that dominant strategic approaches are automatically replicated and reproduced within the contingencies of a particular economy. Instead, significant scope exists for dominant economic imaginaries such as competitiveness to be subject to processes of variation. This may occur for a number of reasons, including their incomplete mastery, their skilful adaptation or ‘recontextualization’ to meet specific circumstances, or as a result of new challenges or crises which often produce profound strategic disorientation and propagate a proliferation of alternative discourses (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). The purpose of this chapter is thus to identify and explore the range of
different variables that may shape the transmission of policy ideas around regional competitiveness into tangible interventions and models of economic governance in practice. In particular, it focuses on exploring the relative importance and agency of the key institutions of state power at the regional level and their capacity to express, represent and mobilize a coherent, collective vision amid competing interests and development agendas, as well as
their power to decide on and deliver transformative action. This directly responds to the call by Jones (2008) for a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between the processes of state rescaling and the spread of key economic imaginaries such as competitiveness. To illustrate the changing competitiveness agenda being pursued by the devolved regional government reference is thus made to the case of Wales in the UK. In so doing, the chapter seeks to address key questions around whether and how regional governments have the potential to modify and vary the dominant competitiveness discourse, and the extent to which their scope for action is constrained. This, in turn, allows for consideration of whether recontextualization of the competitiveness discourse is likely to result in constrained heterogeneity in strategic approaches and outcomes and thus its continued dominance (or ‘requisite variation’), or whether more powerful scope exists for variation in the form of resistance. The chapter begins by utilizing the CPE framework and broader political
economy literature to identify the range of variables which are likely to impact on and effect variation in competitiveness strategies and policy approaches between regions. It then proceeds to establish more specifically the selection and mediation role played by devolved regional governments, before exploring the impact that the establishment of regional government has had in the development of competitiveness strategies in the case of Wales. The chapter concludes by examining the implications for the continued dominance of the regional competitiveness discourse.
