ABSTRACT
With Part I of this book having explored the evolution and meaning of the concept of regional competitiveness, Part II focuses on problematizing the predominance of competitiveness (in its myriad conceptions) in policy terms at the regional scale. This chapter begins the process by focusing on exploring the implications of the dominant pursuit of competitiveness for supranational and national policy approaches to regional development intervention and governance. As Chapter 2 has demonstrated, the adoption and spread of the discourse
of competitiveness has followed directly from contemporary efforts to govern the economy in accordance with a neoliberal rationale. This has, in turn, privileged a particular ‘attractiveness’ conception of competitiveness which constitutes states and their populations as entrepreneurial and competitive ‘place sellers’ in a globalized marketplace for economic influence, resources and investment. The CPE approach has provided a useful mechanism for understanding how the notion of competitiveness has spread from nations to regions and, in so doing, has highlighted its power as a coherent, if eminently elastic, unifying discourse. However, this approach has also raised questions about the extent to which competitiveness is recontextualized when transferred to regions, and how and in what ways this changes both the meaning and the power of the discourse. Answering these questions demands further interrogation of the ways and means by which the competitiveness discourse is spread to regions, and the particular implications of this for regional policy and practice. The purpose of this chapter is thus to consider the role played by top-down
technologies of governance such as benchmarking and key ‘discursive sites’ in developing a particular regional competitiveness policy agenda. The chapter will argue that whilst there are powerful forces for policy imitation and thus, as a result, clear evidence of global convergence in regional policy discourse, approaches and institutional forms, the discourse of regional competitiveness contains certain paradoxes which suggest that the durability and extent of this policy convergence may have been somewhat overstated. The chapter
begins by exploring how and why the discourse of competitiveness promotes convergence around a relatively narrow set of regional policy tools and approaches.
