Cities and Regions in Crisis: The Political Economy of Sub-National Economic Development

Abstract

In the present moment, it is difficult to overstate the importance of functional governments. Increasingly, that means local and regional governments with the operational capacity to respond to both the slow-moving endemic crises of economic inequality, structural racism, and climate change, and also the fast-moving acute crises of economic shocks, social unrest, and public health emergencies rising to the level of pandemic. Martin Jones’s Cities and Regions in Crisis: The Political Economy of Sub-National Economic Development, tells a story about the Sysiphenian enterprise of episodic regional policy (re)design and uneven implementation in the UK over the past forty years. Cities and Regions in Crisis is a culminating compilation of Jones’s work from 1998 to 2018, describing in detail the process of local and regional policy design and development in the UK. Jones’s primary argument is that “the growth of neoliberal modes of intervention” has “weighed down” the capitalist state by loading it up with market failures and “accumulated ambivalence and disorientation.” (p. 37). In other words, these iterative experiments in local and regional governance have worn out the institutional apparatus rather than build it up. As a consequence, institutions are simply less robust and resilient and fundamentally less responsive. No need to look further than the Brexit process (addressed in the book) and the global pandemic to view the validity of this critique. Cities and Regions in Crisis considers crises as the discrete shocks with which we are all so intimately familiar. Jones also presents crises from a theoretical perspective, the crisis of capitalism, associated with a discourse articulated by David Harvey and others. The book stands on a deep treatment of this economic geography literature situated within the temporal and geographic context of the UK’s regional development policy project. From regional development agencies through local enterprise partnerships, Jones takes us along the winding road of regional policy initiatives in the UK and the sustained effort to construct an industry-led, if not wholly privatized, approach to regional development policy. Of course, all of this policy change (perhaps not appropriately described as policy innovation) occurs as the country itself (and many other industrialized countries) grapple with significant and deeply structural economic transitions. In reading Cities and Regions in Crisis, it becomes clear that in the UK, attempts to manage labor market restructuring are central to the story. The laundry lists of workforce development agencies and incumbent worker programs, coupled with the overlapping efforts attempting to get the scale right for both labor market institutions and labor market interventions, are remarkable to see laid out in detail. One theme is the unwavering focus on the supply side of the labor market: skills and training. This calls to mind Doreen Massey’s prescient observation that when policy makers are not blaming places for the failures of the economy, they are blaming the people. In light of Brexit and the global pandemic, Jones’s discussion perhaps serves an additional purpose, somewhat different from the book’s initial intentions. Cities and EC O N O M IC G EO G R A PH Y