Devolution and Economic Governance in the UK: Uneven Geographies, Uneven Capacities?

Abstract

Recent academic debates have suggested that the capacity of any given territory to embed increasingly global processes of economic development partly rests on sub-national social, cultural and institutional forms and supports. In this context, devolution has the potential to alter the institutional architecture of the UK state and this paper interrogates the various ways in which the devolved bodies in the four territories--England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales--have begun to remake their institutional architectures of economic development. The paper also draws out some initial implications of these changes for the emerging uneven geographies and uneven capacities of economic development with the UK, post-devolution. The paper concludes by linking these observations to academic debates on the 'new regionalism'.