Lessons from Germany for levelling up in the UK

This paper suggests how lessons from Germany’s national-level, comprehensively focused place-based regeneration (or levelling up) efforts could be applied in the UK. It draws the direct linkage between spatial inequality and the decline of large-scale heavy manufacturing industry at the end of the 20th century in Germany and the UK. It also posits that rapid deindustrialisation, poor-quality education and other indices of poverty and economic inequality have fuelled political fragmentation — including loss of public trust in government, national and civic institutions — in both countries. The paper explores and compares two sets of German redevelopment efforts over time, in the industrial heartland of the former West German Ruhr region and across the former East Germany, to assess their impacts on reducing political polarisation as well as bolstering redevelopment. It highlights which elements of these efforts have been most successful and why. The German experience, as described in the paper, clearly demonstrates that it takes decades to achieve measurable positive economic outcomes from redevelopment programmes. Political outcomes can also be mixed, even negative, if grassroots sentiment and public well-being are ignored or discounted in the process. In the former East Germany, despite huge transfers of development funds, grievances rooted in the economic and political dislocation of German unification in the 1990s have fuelled anti-establishment politics. The paper also examines how grassroots, philanthropic and private sector actors work alongside regional and federal governments in Germany in shaping positive political as well as socio-economic outcomes and how this might be most effectively adapted for the UK.