ABSTRACT
‘New regionalism’ refers to theoretical and policy perspectives developed since the 1980s that directly relate the relevance of regions as sub-national or city-regional units of economic and political account to the economic restructuring of national economies as a result of globalization and supranational regionalization (as with the European Union (EU), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), etc.). Part of the motivation for the adoption of regions (as opposed to classes or ethnic groups) as the motif for this restructuring lies in seeing how wealth is distributed and redistributed across places (through incentive and training programmes, for example). This is because people’s social lives are anchored geographically and their welfare thus rests, at least to some degree, on staying put rather than moving elsewhere. Another part lies in the popular idea that global uneven development is operating increasingly in relation to regions and localities rather than states as these states are ‘hollowed out’ economically and the ‘regulatory’ response to this process is now best organized at the regional scale. There are therefore both normative and positivist elements to the ‘new regionalism’. It is about the seemingly increasing economic disparities between sub-national regions as a result of enhanced economic competition but it is also concerned to argue that economic processes are increasingly organized with reference to the regional scale rather than that of the national state as they presumably were in the recent past.
