Entrepreneurial Spaces, Hegemony, and State Strategy: The Political Shaping of Privatism in Lowland Scotland

Abstract

Throughout the mid-1990s, considerable misgivings have emerged about the value of regulation theory for concrete research. Whilst acknowledging much of this critique, I seek to operationalize some recent interpretations of the ‘geography of regulation’ and regulation-theoretic state theory towards an analysis of the governance of economic development in Lowland Scotland. I argue that, when suitably contextualized, these approaches help to foreground some complex issues of scale, particularly the interactions between national, regional, and local levels, as well as to highlight the integral politics which surround the governance of urban and regional spaces. In substantive terms, this paper focuses on the decision to replace the Scottish Development Agency with the Scottish Enterprise Network. The latter was heralded by the Conservative government as a new private-sector-led hegemon within Lowland Scotland's emerging form of ‘entrepreneurial’ governance. However, the discussion below demonstrates two key factors. First, that the formation of such ‘local enterprise’ was a highly politicized endeavour; one which needs to be understood within the context of the broader dynamics of a (then) centralizing British state. And, second, a key net effect of the new structure is that the informal networks and partnerships which characterized the mode of governance in the 1980s under the hegemony of the Scottish Development Agency have been jeopardized in and through the ‘turf wars’ which have accompanied the post-1991 institutional milieu. This political shaping of privatism within one of the United Kingdom's more institutionally endowed and relatively autonomous spaces thereby provides some lessons for a New Labour government committed towards reconfiguring the contours of regional economic development in the regions and nations of the United Kingdom.