Abstract
This article investigates how the international wave of decentralisation of development policy, promoted through ideals of place-based policy, becomes practice through development interventions made by municipalities in Sweden. Based on an extensive empirical study across Swedish municipalities, the article contributes with knowledge about how the decentralisation of development policies is formed through a combination of shared and relatively heterodox conditions for development interventions across the different categories of municipalities: cities, towns and rural settlements. The results describe the varying scope of local development interventions and how decentralisation involves differentiating the involvement of municipalities into vertical and horizontal relations within the planning sector. The article’s findings about the variations in local development interventions across the different categories of municipalities contribute to the debate within geography on the varying capacities of different geographical formations to mobilise for bottom-up development, leading to the weaker regions remaining weak. The results of this article also illustrate the importance of reflecting upon how particular national planning systems shape the implications of the general international trend towards the decentralisation of local development policy.
Highlights
During the last few decades, there has been a growing debate about what is described as a general and continuing trend towards decentralising development policy (Pike et al, 2017; Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008)
The aim of this article is to investigate how the decentralisation of development policy is adopted through local planning and how this varies across different geographical environments
The aim of this article has been to investigate how the decentralising of development policy is adopted through local planning and how this varies across different geographical environments
Summary
During the last few decades, there has been a growing debate about what is described as a general and continuing trend towards decentralising development policy (Pike et al, 2017; Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008). Local development policies have been established in advanced countries (O’Brien and Pike, 2019; Schneider and Cottineau, 2019; Vázquez-Barquero and Rodríguez-Cohard, 2016), for which local and regional planning bodies are important actors (Brenner, 1999; Rodríguez-Pose and Gill, 2004). This decentralisation of government is described as an effect of the global post-Keynesian wave of rescaling policy interventions (Brenner, 2003; Jonas and Moisio, 2018; McCann, 2017; European Urban and Regional Studies 00(0). Decentralisation can be interpreted as a bottom-up discourse enabled by top-down actors in the way that it advocates ‘a developmentalist approach aiming at maximizing the development potential of all regions’ (Barca et al, 2012: 146), and that the values of economic development have become ‘a central justification for the decentralisation of power’ (Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008: 69)
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