Rescaling and Regional Governance: The English Regional Development Agencies and the Environment

The establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in the English regions will bring about an important change in UK regional governance. A key area of contention and struggle is likely to occur over the contribution of the RDAs to sustainable development. Although the pursuit of sustainable development is a stated goal of the RDAs, in this paper we argue that this goal is likely to be compromised by tensions and contradictions emerging in the evolving new governance landscape of England. In terms of promoting sustainable-development policy, the regional scale of the UK state is becoming materially and discursively significant, and a particular focus of struggles around economic and environmental issues. These struggles strategically intersect with wider processes of reregulation and rescaling in the UK state. We not only consider the practical policy implications of integrating the economy and environment at the regional scale, but also analyse emerging tensions in regional governance in the light of processes of social reregulation and rescaling within the UK state. We argue that theoretical approaches to the latter need to incorporate the uneven process of rescaling and the contingent nature of regional state forms and institutions.