Introduction

Over the last 30 years, and especially since the first energy crisis of the 1970s and the neoliberal réveil, regional development and urban regeneration strategies have traditionally swung between two poles. The discourses surrounding the dominant neoliberal practices tend to represent the economy' as a monolithic entity, outside the realm and control of ordinary social life. The transformation of the state/civil society relationship is situated within an analysis of consolidating neoliberal capitalism. Erik Swyngedouw's analysis of governance beyond-the-state' confronts tensions between innovative institutional arrangements and their framing within a largely market-driven political-economic context. Swyngedouw teases out the contradictory ways in which new arrangements of governance have created innovative institutions and empowered new actors, while disempowering others. In recent years, a proliferating body of scholarship has attempted to theorize and substantiate empirically the emergence of new formal or informal institutional arrangements that engage in the act of governing outside and beyond the state.