IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/nierev/v233y2015ipr14-r26_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

City deals, decentralisation and the governance of local infrastructure funding and financing in the UK

Author

Listed:
  • O'Brien, Peter
  • Pike, Andy

Abstract

This article reflects upon a comparative analysis of the 28 ‘City Deals’ agreed between UK government, Scottish government and city-regional groupings in England and Scotland since 2011. The City Deals have sought to incentivise local actors to identify and prioritise ‘asks’ of UK and devolved governments, fund, finance and deliver infrastructure and other economic development interventions, and to reform city/city-region governance structures to ‘unlock’ urban growth. Our analysis is based upon 32 in-depth interviews with lead actors in the City Deals, including elected officials from local government, central government officials and policy specialists from think tanks, as well as a secondary literature review. We find that City Deals are reworking the role of the UK state internally and through changed central-local and intra-local (city-regional) relations. Regional and urban public policy is being recast as a process of deal-making founded upon territorial competition and negotiation between central national and local actors unequally endowed with information and resources, leading to highly imbalanced and inequitable outcomes across the UK. As a template for public policymaking in an emergent and decentralising context, deal-making raises substantive and unresolved issues for governance in the UK that are especially pertinent as the new Conservative government at Westminster pledges to widen and broaden this approach as a central component of its future devolution strategy and policy.

Suggested Citation

  • O'Brien, Peter & Pike, Andy, 2015. "City deals, decentralisation and the governance of local infrastructure funding and financing in the UK," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 233, pages 14-26, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:nierev:v:233:y:2015:i::p:r14-r26_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0027950100007262/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kate Broadhurst & Edward Steane & Vlad Mykhnenko & Nicholas Gray, 2023. "Intergovernmental dynamics in responding to COVID-19 in English and Australian cities," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 16(1), pages 185-196.
    2. Phillip O’Neill, 2019. "The financialisation of urban infrastructure: A framework of analysis," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(7), pages 1304-1325, May.
    3. Hulya Dagdeviren & Ewa Karwowski, 2022. "Impasse or mutation? Austerity and (de)financialisation of local governments in Britain [Regul(ariz)ation of fringe credit: Payday lending and the borders of global financial practice]," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 22(3), pages 685-707.
    4. Ikonomou, Constantinos, 2023. "Another View on Growth Matters: Investment, Capital, and Solow Residual," MPRA Paper 119003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Daniel Durrant & Tom Cohen, 2023. "Mini-Publics as an innovation in spatial governance," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 41(6), pages 1183-1199, September.
    6. Stephen Hall & Andrew EG Jonas & Simon Shepherd & Zia Wadud, 2019. "The smart grid as commons: Exploring alternatives to infrastructure financialisation," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(7), pages 1386-1403, May.
    7. Stephanie Farmer & Chris D Poulos, 2019. "The financialising local growth machine in Chicago," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(7), pages 1404-1425, May.
    8. Martin Ferry, 2021. "Pulling things together: regional policy coordination approaches and drivers in Europe [‘PiS wchodzi w buty marszałków. Cel? Miliony z funduszy europejskich’]," Policy and Society, Darryl S. Jarvis and M. Ramesh, vol. 40(1), pages 37-57.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:nierev:v:233:y:2015:i::p:r14-r26_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.