ABSTRACT
A good ten years ago, against the backdrop of a growing debate on ‘new regionalism’, Deas and Ward (2000) suggested that the UK’s new post-1997 regional agenda could be interpreted as part of a shift from two decades of an explicitly urban-centric view of national development policies, to something more regional in perspective and ambition. Now, at least in the UK, more specifically, England, it appears, the pendulum swings back again, and we seem to come full circle. Collaborative localism is to entirely replace territorially defined regions and their – limited – institutional ‘voices’. This suggests a shift beyond the paradigm of ‘new regionalism’ with its notions of flexible, open structures and importance of inter-actor politics, that have dominated the debate on regions and regional governance for at least the last decade, towards a new focus on localism. Yet, while concerned with variability and responsiveness to political-economic dynamism, ‘new regionalism’ nevertheless acknowledges structures in their – albeit limited – necessity. New political agendas, as currently evidenced in the UK, however, may well go beyond that and do away with all forms of regionally based, institutionalised expressions of spatially defined interest. In effect, so it is argued here, this represents a shift towards a form of ‘post-regionalism’, which comprises two main phases:
A recent shift towards new regionalism: this refers to a move from hierarchical structure and fixed spaces in a conventional, essentially modernist scalar layering of administrative-governmental territories, to a more flexible, relationally defined, post-modern understanding and practice of constructing and using the regional level, rather than being simply defined by its scale per se.
A seemingly new shift towards post-regionalism: a growing localisation and metropolitanisation of the regional scale of governance leads to a dissection of ‘region’ into temporary, policy-driven, potentially infinite number of local groupings, where (regional) territoriality is a mere (incidental) outcome of collaboration.
