Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Making up a region: the rise and fall of the ‘South East of England’ as a political territory Journal Item How to cite: Cochrane, Allan (2012). Making up a region: the rise and fall of the ‘South East of England’ as a political territory. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 30(1) pp. 95–108. For guidance on citations see FAQs. (cid:13)c 2012 Pion Ltd. and its Licensors Version: Accepted Manuscript Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1068/c1149r Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Making up a region: the rise and fall of the ‘South East of England’ as a political territory Allan Cochrane, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA [email protected] Word count: 6380 plus 1633 references 1 Abstract Despite a growing academic scepticism about the significance of territory as a driver of politics, it remains a stubborn presence in the practice of politics. In the context of the wider UK devolution agenda, the first decade of this century saw the emergence of an English regionalist project, based around a series of regional institutions and governance networks. In other words, it appeared that a new framework for sub-national territorial politics was being constructed. With the help of a case study of the South East of England, this paper both explores both the fragility of the project in practice, but also notes the continuing importance of territory as a focus of politics, highlighting the importance of recognising that territory is not to be taken as something given, somehow pre-existing and waiting to be filled with politics, but rather as something that is actively formed and shaped through the political process 2 Making up a region: the rise and fall of the ‘South East of England’ as a political territory The recognition that geography, and political geography in particular, need to be understood in relational terms has encouraged a degree of scepticism about approaches that identify territory as the basis of social and political organisation (see, e.g., Allen and Cochrane 2007, Amin 2004). One response has been to develop complex stories of multi-scalar, entangled and overlapping sets of power relationships where understandings of ‘the geography of state leverage [are] far more malleable and indeterminate than hitherto’ (Allen and Cochrane 2010, p. 1072). This approach is particularly reflected in the subtle and often painstaking work of Neil Brenner and others (Brenner 2004, Brenner et al 2008), and in a more descriptive way in analyses of multi-level governance (Bache and Flinders 2004, Healey 2004), drawn from debates around the European Union and its governance. More recently emphasis has been placed on the significance of the ways in which policies travel through space, being defined by their mobility as much as their often disputed origins, while necessarily being grounded and realised in particular places (McCann and Ward 2011) Yet in some respects politics in practice still seems to retain a strong territorial focus, or at least territory seems still to provide a significant focus around which a range of political projects are organised. And territory has also made a strong theoretical comeback, as what Joe Painter has called ‘the quintessential state space’ (Painter 2010: 1090). Serious and often persuasive responses to some of the implications of following the logic of relational thinking through have sought to reclaim the notion of 3 territory in creative ways (see, e.g., Jonas 2011, Jones 2009. And Martin Jones has been particularly critical of the ‘crude caricature’ he suggests is being propagated by relational thinkers, ‘whereby all non-relational thinking is conveniently displaced into notions of static space’ (Jones 2009: 494). In rejecting any straightforward binary division between ‘relational’ and ‘territorial’ approaches, however, this paper seeks to frame the issue rather differently, in the hope of being able to move beyond both the crude caricature identified by Jones as well as the equally crude caricature of ‘relational thinkers’ which he presents in turn. Rather than dismissing the importance of territory as a political site, here an attempt is made to locate it rather more precisely within a relational frame, setting out to understand territory not as given, but as made, not as necessary, but as contingent, in line with Anssi Paasi’s injunction to see territory as a social process (Paasi 2003). Following Doreen Massey 2005, the paper sets out to understand regional space in terms of territory but does so through a lens that focuses on the ways in which places are defined and define themselves, are made and remade, imagined and re-imagined, in practice. It is probably not helpful to start by setting up false distinctions between the different approaches and dismissing one or the other as a result. More positively the aim here is build on the insights of Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton (2010) and reflect on the implications that the identification of soft spaces of governance and the existence of fuzzy boundaries may have for understanding the recent politics of English regionalism. These issues are approached through a review of a particular territorial project that emerged from the wider politics of devolution in the UK after 1998. Devolution has 4 produced new territorial governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, while claims have also been made for the potential significance of the English regions and city-regions. The impact of devolution on the governance of the UK has been widely reviewed (see, e.g., among many others, Bradbury and Mitchell 2005, Goodwin et al 2005, Jeffery and Wincott 2006, Mitchell 2009) and there has also been substantial discussion of the position of England within the new arrangements, often with a nod towards the extent to which an English regional agenda has emerged or is emerging (see, e.g., Chen and Wright 2002, Hazell 2006, Jones and McLeod 2004, Mitchell 2002, Morgan 2002). In this context it becomes necessary to clarify the ways in which England’s regions have been made up as governmental territories, rather than taking them for granted as pre-existing entities, just waiting to be brought to political life. So, for example, Joe Painter takes on this task by focusing on the way in which GVA (Gross Value Added) has been translated from the apparent abstraction of accounting practices into a political expression which is mobilised to define regional economic success and an English regional hierarchy. He argues that ‘the governmental technologies that produce the effect of territory are the product of spatially extensive networks of human and non-human actors’ (Painter 2010, p. 1114) generating a tightly knit set of relationships so that ‘the exercise of regional administrative power in the economic field results in the production of territorial understandings of economic practices and processes’ (Painter 2010, p. 1103). From a rather different perspective, drawing on state theory, Mark Goodwin, Martin Jones and Rhys Jones nevertheless reach a similar conclusion, specifically drawing attention to the importance of the ways in which the various institutions of regionalism are ‘peopled’ (Goodwin et al 2004). And 5 John Lovering has memorably identified the emergence of a class of regional professionals competed for government attention, seeking to attract investment of one sort or another as members of a ‘regional service class’ (Lovering 2003). Rather than making up a network of globally competitive regions, from this perspective, the initiatives of official regionalism were much more effective in creating a policy world in which regions competed with each other for the hand outs of government, whether in the form of infrastructure, research laboratories or project funding, delivered through the sustainable communities plan or crumbs from the table of the London Olympics, or whatever the latest area based initiative of government might be (from city region to local enterprise partnership). Academic responses to the regionalist project in its (modest) heyday tended to provide critically supportive commentary – often telling an insider story to a (slightly) wider public, as well as questioning the commitment of central government to the process. Books, such as Hardill et al 2006, Sandford 2005 and Tomaney and Mawson 2002, all sympathetically told the story of an emergent regional system. Meanwhile, among many other examples, papers focused on the tensions between the role of regional development agencies as drivers of economic competiveness and other roles relating to social cohesion and the environment (Pearce and Ayres 2009); on the extent to which they might work to challenge social deprivation (North et al 2007); on the extent to which regionally based government offices might fill a more extensive governance role (Pearce et al 2008); on the limits of the existing model as a means of delivering territorial equity (Pike and Tomaney 2009); and on the possibility of developing more inclusive approaches to regional governance (Humphrey and Shaw 2006). 6 In other words, the underlying assumption was that regionalism was more or less securely embedded within England’s polity, and what mattered was to reflect on ways of mobilizing the institutions more effectively. Joe Painter felt confident enough to claim that ‘the eight English regions do constitute territories (or territories in formation)…, that is, they are represented as delimited, contiguous and coherent political spaces’ (Painter 2010, 1103); and Mark Goodwin, Martin Jones and Rhys Jones asserted that the UK model was becoming closer to that of (some) European countries as ‘a highly unitary system of government [was] gradually shifting towards one which highlights regional and national differences’ (Goodwin et al 2006, p. 980); while Graham Pearce and Sarah Ayres suggested that what was emerging was part of a wider reconfiguration ‘of governance around territory' (Pearce and Ayres, 2006, p. 911). Nor were they alone in drawing such conclusions (see, e.g., Cochrane 2006, who similarly identifies moves towards a more embedded political regionalism). It turns out, however, that Neil Brenner’s warning (quoted by Goodwin et al) is more than just a necessary obeisance to avoid the accusation of structural determinism. As he puts it: ‘State spatiality is never permanently fixed, but…represents an emergent, strategically selective and politically contested process’ (Brenner 2004, p. 89;. his italics). In this case, the new institutional arrangements were rather fragile and they have disappeared with little obvious political response. This paper sets out to explore this process by considering the experience of the South East of England over the last decade or so. Discussion of the politics of regionalism in 7 England has tended (with some notable exceptions, such as John et al 2005, Musson et al 2002, Peck and Tickell 1995, as well as Allen et al 1998) to take rather a different territorial starting point, since in academic as well as policy discussion the ‘regions’ are generally understood to be the regions outside London and the South East. And traditionally regional policy has been a policy targeted on those regions. But shifting the focus to the South East of England is particularly instructive in this context because it makes it possible to trace the process by which it was ‘regionalised’ politically – re-imagined as a political territory in its own right. It provides the opportunity not only to explore the construction of a particular territorial politics, but also to reflect on its unmaking (or perhaps more accurately its remaking along different lines), in the wake of the election of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. The approach being adopted in the paper makes it possible to reflect on some of the limitations and fragility of the UK’s devolution project as it was uneasily translated into English regionalism. The next section of the paper sets out the wider context of the regionalist project, before turning to the particular positioning of the South East within it, and some of the tensions associated with that process. The invention of English regionalism The history of English regionalism as an active governmental project is a relatively brief one. There were some regionally based institutions before 1997 and some vestigial structures have survived the cull undertaken after 2010, but it was the 8 election of new Labour that brought with it the set of regional structures, which have now been demolished. They took what was an existing network of regionally based offices of central government, and introduced alongside it an institutional architecture of regional development agencies and regional assemblies. In a neo-liberalised version of corporatism, even if in practice they were often deeply entangled with state bureaucracies, the new institutions sought to incorporate major regional interests, nominally under a form of business leadership. By the end of the 1990s, a more or less universal template was being applied across England. England’s regions were being re-imagined as territories to be governed – in (more or less distant) echoes of the shifts taking place in the other nations of the UK and in Northern Ireland. This was always an uncertain process and attempts to create electorally accountable regional institutions soon ran into the sand (even the relatively toothless regional assemblies were scheduled for abolition before Labour’s electoral defeat in 2010). So while the process has sometimes being interpreted in ways that suggest it was consistent with approaches to regions and regional governance elsewhere in the European Union (in France, Germany or Spain), it was always a more modest enterprise and the extent of regional autonomy was always severely restricted (to the extent that the government’s regional offices effectively remained agencies of the centre in managing and controlling local government) (see, e.g., Pearce et al 2008, Whitehead 2003). Nevertheless, one consequence was that every English ‘region’ – including those identified as ‘best-performing’ – was given a new institutional status. A heavily populated institutional landscape was constructed through England’s regions, circling 9