The march of governance and the actualities of failure: the case of economic development twenty years on

Martin Jones

doi:10.1111/issj.12169

Abstract

AbstractTwenty years ago, Bob Jessop (1998) published a defining piece on the “rise of governance” and the “risks of failure”, using the example of economic development to frame concerns with the state of capitalism at that time. This charted the rise of governance, outlined key governance practices, and offered preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of governance failure ‒ given that whilst there are already extensive literatures on market failure and state failure, governance failure required focused concern and thematic analysis. This paper, 20 years post‐Jessop on governance rise and risks, tells the tale of how governance in Britain (and England specifically) has marched on and, building on Jessop, has indeed failed, repeatedly and spectacularly. The paper reveals Jessop's governance dilemmas in action and specifically how the contradictions and crises tendencies of capitalism have both necessitated the use of, and been played out in and through, geographical space. The paper reveals an economic governance landscape of unresolved crises and contradictions, which is linked to problems of state rationality and legitimation, exhibited by the Brexit debacle in Britain.

Highlights

Capital never solves its crisis tendencies; it merely moves them around
His current research interests plexity and opacity of the four tasks. It first charted the interest in and rise of governance – namely the role include society and space, state theory, and the geographies of neoliberalism. He has recently completed an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research social world, failure becomes the most likely outcome of most attempts of markets, states, and part- project on city region building and the to govern it with refernerships in economic coor- geographies of economic governance in two ence to multiple objectives dination and the cyclical modes coordination
Key for Britain was social and political unrest, with the government responding with the raft of state interventions on urban policy ignited by the 1977 Urban White Paper and 1978 Inner Urban Areas Act, where “local economic development was encouraged by the policy vacuum created by the retreat of national regional policy in areas of increasing unemployment and by the introduction of locally delivered national schemes such as the Urban Programme” (Mawson 2009, p.41)

Summary

Introduction

Capital never solves its crisis tendencies; it merely moves them around. This is what theory tells us, and this is what the history of the past 40 years has been about. (Harvey 2011, p.11, original emphasis).

Results

Conclusion