NEW LABOR'S URBAN REGENERATION PROGRAMMES

Community Engagement And Capacity Building Were Central To New Labor's Urban Regeneration Programmes



Community Engagement And Capacity Building Were Central To New Labor's Urban Regeneration Programmes

Introduction

Debate on the role of ideas in public policy has a long history (Birch 1964; Beer 1965; Greenleaf 1983; Hall 1986, 1993; Reich 1989; Legro 2000), but has been revitalized in recent times by the interpretive turn in political studies and in social science more generally. In British politics, the nature of the majoritarian system produces what are ostensibly sudden and substantive shifts in the paradigms at the heart of government. As such, it provides an ideal test bed for tracing the impact of these shifts on public policies. Our focus here is on urban governance and, specifically, on institutional design for urban regeneration programmes. We consider the same policy instrument, the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), from its origins under the Conservative government in the 1990s, through to the end of the second term of the New Labour government in 2005. In doing so, we aim to do three things: first, to highlight the ideational contrast between the approach to urban governance of New Labour and Conservative governments; second, to trace through the relationship between these ideational contrasts and the different institutional designs they produce; and, third, to analyse the consequences of this ideational shift 'on the ground' through a comparative study of local partnerships in the city of Sheffield.

 

Interpreting New Labor

Mark Bevir's (2005, 2006) interpretivist account of New Labour is concerned not only with understanding what informs New Labour, but also with how this relates to practice. It is an approach thatfocuses on practices composed of actions in flux. It explains actions by referring to the conscious, sub-conscious, and unconscious beliefs embedded in them. And it explains these beliefs by reference to historically contingent traditions, which situated agents modify as they respond to specific dilemmas. (Bevir 2006, p. 90)

In this view, the 'Third Way' is a response to the dilemmas posed by the New Right that draws on both social democratic ideas and modernist social science. Where we differ from Bevir is in relation to his view that New Labour's approach to partnership governance is driven by a concern with efficiency rather than ascribing at least part of this approach to democratic imperatives (Bevir 2006, p. 90). He suggests that New Labour is: 'wedded to a liberal account of democracy as representative government', which contrasts with non-governmental socialists who want to supplement liberal democracy who want to 'adopt other rights and devices so as to extend democracy to other areas of social life … even handling aspects of governance over to other associations' (Bevir 2006, pp. 91-2).

URBAN GOVERNANCE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

For the first 30 years of the post-war period, the dominance of the Keynesian economic paradigm meant that urban governance was almost exclusively the realm of the public sector. To the extent that there was 'partnership' in the economic development of cities, this was between central and local ...