Seeing like a business: rethinking the role of business in regional development, planning and governance

Rather than accept the mainstream view that the state needs need to be brought back in to regional thinking, the paper argues that the state – and the analysis of it – is restricting understandings of urban and regional change and leading to a state-territorial trap. Analysing over 40 years of literature on growth-oriented regionalism, the paper reveals important blind spots in the approaches to researching regions (and other forms of place-making) and the role of business in regional development, planning and governance. Presenting a comparison of two spatial governance projects in the UK – The Peel Group’s Atlantic Gateway Strategy and UK government’s Local Enterprise Partnerships – it is revealed how business-orchestrated regionalism is a new empirical reality, but one we are ill-equipped to understand. It argues that we need to move beyond the conceptual and methodological lock-in of business-as-usual approaches to start ‘seeing like a business’ and revealing the practical politics and pragmatism by which actors – both state and business – are engaging to effect regional change and shape regional futures.