ABSTRACT
In Britain, the development of local governance has been particularly marked. The relative decline in the power of elected local government in Britain (at least in most policy areas) and the substantive shift towards a more diffuse ‘local governance’ have further complicated the relationship between the spatial scale of ‘the local’ and the processes and institutions which affect localities. This chapter summarizes the main characteristics of local governance under British Fordism in relation to what we regard as the key institutional sites of regulation. Some writers have indeed claimed that local governance in Britain is changing from a Fordist to a ‘post-Fordist’ or ‘neo-Fordist’ form, but this can amount to little more than cataloguing a series of changes which seem to fit with a supposed model of ‘post-Fordist’ industrial organization. The relatively stable regulation of economic activity provided by Fordism was premised on the possibility of national modes of growth.