ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the changing rationales and practices through which the state has sought to promote growth and manage the contradictions, focusing particularly on the approach of the Coalition government since 2010. It deals with the changing rationales and discourses of urban and regional governance in the UK, highlighting the problem of spatially uneven development and the successive policy approaches through which the state has sought to govern its contradictions, together with their underlying rationales. Turning to contemporary patterns of governance under the Coalition government since 2010, the chapter outlines its austerity programme and approach to localism. It focuses on debates around local decentralisation and devolution, which have gained renewed momentum in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum of September 2014. Notwithstanding its abolition of the Regional Development Agencies the Conservative-Liberal Democratic Coalition government of 2010–2015 advanced a discourse of sectoral and regional rebalancing.
