This dismantling of the sub-national state in the UK under the Thatcher and Major governments has been interpreted as part of wider processes of economic restructuring taking place across Western Europe during this era that have been associated with a rescaling of economic activity. From this
economic rescaling has been interpreted a rescaling of the state, in which the role of the national state has been challenged by local and regional scales in the governance of economic development (Jones, 2001). In the case of 1980s and 1990s England, as elsewhere, this process of rescaling involved the animation of local and regional institutions of a variety of types, from elected local government to executive arm’s length bodies acting in local areas and regional branches of private sector membership bodies, in the name of generating a degree of corporate self-governance along the lines of that exhibited in such exemplars as the Baden-Würtemburg region of Germany
(Mawson, 1996). Yet the bottom-up institutionalisation of the English localities and regions also responded to their loss of statutory and administrative power under the Thatcher and Major governments and to the proliferation of agencies whose collective activities required just the sort of network and partnership forms of governance championed elsewhere.
Thus while the restructuring of the local and regional state in 1980s and 1990s England cannot be directly read off from literature that addresses the rescaling of the state, such research can provide a theoretical basis from which the English case can be explored. Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (Jessop, 1990; 2001; 2002) offers a framework which has been used to interpret the uneven nature of state spatial restructuring by positing three ways in which the state is being reorganised in response to globalisation: ‘denationalisation’; ‘destatisation’; and the ‘internationalisation of policy regimes’. Denationalisation describes the process by which the capacities of the national state are dispersed upwards, to supra-national bodies, downwards, to local and regional states, and outwards, to relatively autonomous groupings of local and regional states with shared interests. This is
demonstrated empirically in the ‘hollowing-out’ of the national state (Jessop, 2002). Destatisation is the reassignment of functions between public and private spheres within the national territory, depicted in the shift from government to governance. The internationalisation of policy regimes describes the growth of international networks of policy transfer and the increased significance of the global context in which states, as strategic actors, exist.
The shape taken by governance rescaling is not a deterministic consequence of the structural trends undermining the primacy of the spatial order that prevailed before the crisis of spatial Keynesianism, weakening the role of the national scale and hollowing-out the capacities of the national state (Jessop, 1997), but is dependent too upon how these powers are reassembled and manifested at other scales, in a process of ‘filling-in’ (Goodwin et al, 2005). Within this understanding scale is not the product of a hierarchically ordered managerial state but, rather, is dependent upon an
interaction between the national state and the institutional context of each specific locality, and consequently varies in form across cases. This corresponds to conceptualisations of governance as a
trial-and-error process in which outcomes are not dictated by fiat but, rather, are negotiated and subject to conditioning factors of variation, selection and retention (Jessop, 1995).
The shift from government to governance is used by the state in the regulation of economic activities, as it withdraws to a great extent from a direct engagement in the planning of economic development and engages non-state funds, knowledge and expertise through the means of partnership agreements with non-state actors, in which the state is but the ‘first among equals’ (Jessop, 1997). In this the state maintains, however, the role of strategic coordinator, assuming responsibility for the governance of governance by providing the ground rules by which it is conducted and ensuring that the coherence of the national state is maintained amongst the
dispersion of governance systems and solutions (ibid), illustrating the fact that governance operates in the shadow of (hierarchical) government (Jessop, 2002).
While authors have referred to a hollowing-out of the local and regional state (e.g. Patterson and Pinch, 1995; Williams, 1999), Jessop’s notion of denationalisation refers explicitly to the process by which powers disperse from the national state. As such, the diminution of the local and regional scales during the 1980s and 1990s in England cannot be understood as a hollowing-out of these, but rather must be seen in the context of processes of denationalisation and destatisation taking place at the national scale. As government functions that were devolved to or delivered at the local and regional scales are reassigned to QUANGOs and other arm’s length agencies that may involve the private sector, the responsibilities of the local and regional state for the welfare of citizens and for growth in employment nevertheless increase, as the national state relinquishes control over the maintenance of growth across the national space. The result of this appears contradictory, as the capacities of the local and regional state are reduced just as its responsibilities are increased. Yet it is posited here that it is this dilemma, prompted by national state policy in combination with the need for the restructuring of regional economies and changes in European regional policy, which prompted the voluntary coordination of governance activity at the local and regional scales during the 1980s and 1990s in the North West region.