Territory, Politics, and Relational Autonomy

This issue of Territory, Politics, Governance is illustrative of our goal of creating an inter-, and even ‘post-disciplinary’, as Jessop and Sum (2001) put it, platform for analysing in a myriad ways the interactions between our political and territorial worlds. To paraphrase Agnew's (2013) editorial introduction to the first issue of this journal, this is occurring at a variety of spatial and temporal scales and in a diversity of political organizational contexts. Our project is to fully expose this to intellectual, political, and policy debates. In this issue, we accordingly have interesting and important contributions from geography, economics, sociology, anthropology, architecture, engineering, management and business studies. These scholars are also drawn from a variety of institutions in the USA, UK, Canada, France, and Australia. Territory, Politics, Governance has very much landed and we are delighted to present to you papers drawing on a variety of intellectual traditions, theoretical approaches, data and methods, and doing those tricky iterative negotiations between concepts and empirical analysis, and vice versa.

There is an important social science theme running through this issue of Territory, Politics, Governance—that of ‘autonomy’ and its spatiality and temporality. The word ‘autonomous’ comes from the Greek autos-nomos, meaning ‘self-legislation’. Although autonomy is a somewhat slippery concept, ‘moveable, historically specific, highly contextual and contested and used to pursue a variety of ends and ideologies’ (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006, p. 732), it has been used, with varying successes in fiscal, political, and legal contexts, to tease out the relationships between the levels or tiers of the state and the balances between different spheres of being in advanced capitalism (public–private, formal–informal, and capital–non-capital). Gordon Clark, one of the contributors to this issue of Territory, Politics, Governance argued for a ‘theory of local autonomy’ a while back, in that instance to capture institutions and their relative geographical power vis-à-vis the different tiers, or scales, of the state (in this case local and state-level governmental relationships) (Clark, 1984). A series of typologies were offered—type 1 (initiative and immunity), type 2 (initiative and no immunity), type 3 (no initiative and immunity), type 4 (no initiative and no immunity), etc.—to capture ideal interactive situations and this was later put to work on innovative research on legal geographies (Clark and Dear, 1984; Clark, 1985) and applied by others on geographies of the ‘new federalism’ in the USA (see also Kirby, 1993).

Brown's excellent review of the possibilities opened up by this analysis on urban and regional political economy though, noted dangers of spatial reification: notions of ‘local’ and ‘regional’ being treated as pre-given, as opposed to being constituted through geohistorical and spatialized social processes, and vice versa. Brown offered new forms of analysis and the agenda hereafter, for the ‘geography of autonomy’, was to be defined by relational analysis. As Brown (1992) put it, ‘understanding power relationally, and acknowledging the role place plays in the exercise of power relations, can account for both the constraints on and possibility for local autonomy’ (p. 276). And, there have been some key contributions to this intellectual call from this and other perspectives over the years (see Mackenzie and Stoljar, 1999; Agnew, 2002; Jones and Fowler, 2008).

Some 30 years on from ‘a theory of local autonomy’, this agenda is still a live and important intellectual concern for the social sciences—and especially now in how territories, places, scales, and networks (spatial categories defined and delimited by Jessop et al., 2008) relate to each other and feature in (to either enable or constrain) ongoing state building activities and the politics of struggle and contestation over economic and social life (Clark and Jones, 2011; Jones 2013). Notions of ‘relational-autonomy’, then, loosely defined as the making of territorial politics in and through power relations, which are in turn formed through struggles around multiple and polymorphous sociospatial relations, is a project we wish to explore further in the pages of Territory, Politics, Governance and the papers in this issue start the ball rolling.

Storper's essay, delivered as the Territory, Politics, Governance annual lecture at the Association of American Geographers 2014 Tampa conference, kicks this off and also advances debates on governance and multilevel governance that have appeared in this journal (Cox, 2013; Madsen, 2014) and in the work of co-editors (see Goodwin et al., 2012; Keating, 2013). Storper's essay builds on his landmark book Keys to the City, where ‘city-regions are the principal scale at which people experience lived reality’ (2013, p. 4). The geographical churn, turbulence, and unevenness of development, combined with the sheer scale of urbanization, will make city-region development more important than ever—to economics, politics, our global mood, and our welfare—and a topic to be analysed in Territory, Politics, Governance. And managing it will pose one of the most critical challenges to humanity. Storper adds, ‘[t]he winning side of the process will excite us and motivate talent, but the losing side will create displacement and anger, both within and between countries’ (ibid., p. 4). The ‘big game to be hunted’, then, as Storper puts it is insights into the drivers of changes in the geography of economic development and its population. Here, integrative analysis on the urban territorial fabric and its complex and interrelated elements is lacking; explaining the growth and change of cities vis-à-vis the urban fabric is one of the great challenges for social science. Cities and regions, like any other geographical scale of the economic system, have complex economic development processes that are shaped by an almost-infinite range of forces (some bounded with the urban and some relational that transcend administrative boundaries and control).

Storper’s (2014) essay seeks a window on such complex urbanization processes by problematizing the nature of urban governance and its territorial basis, with the assistance of an innovative take on principal-agent problems. Metropolitan governance has been historically shaped by the strong interdependencies between the ‘fragmented geography’ of public service provision and the roles that development and other agencies play in providing a territorial-fix for accumulation and regulation. The key point Storper makes is that such fragmentation—or ‘territorial non-correspondence’ as Cox (2008, p. 342) puts it—is neither an accident and nor should it need fixing. It is the result of differences in the political territorial preferences of constituencies (the ‘politics of turf’—Cox, 1989, 2013) and the regulatory scaling of public goods and services to both achieve efficiencies over space and also respond to social/class struggles for resources allocation/distribution. Thus, metropolitan governance will always exhibit a ‘haphazard’ form through perpetual ‘tinkering’ without ever reaching an optimal solution. This means that the notion of, and political practice of, a ‘unifying apex’ (Smith, 1978, p. 178) for doing territorial correspondence misunderstands the complexities of capitalism, state intervention, and public policy in and through space.

This raises two very important questions for readers of this journal. First, how then do we measure the effectivity of governance and deal with notions of governance failure, regulatory deficits, and deficiencies in ‘regulatory capacity’ (Goodwin and Painter, 1996)? Drawing on involvement in several European projects, Storper (2014) offers new insights into this. Second, why is it that policy-makers and practitioners insist on the need to solve spatial complexity through making administrative and service delivery territories coterminous?

A close-to-my-home example fleshes out the timely nature of Storper's second point. In April 2013, for instance, the Williams Commission was tasked with examining all aspects of governance and delivery in the devolved public sector in Wales, because it was deemed to be far too confusing and complex. According to the Williams Commission, the way in which the public sector has evolved also creates a risk that the boundaries of local and regional organizations are not coterminous, ‘that is, they do not coincide’ and

a lack of coterminosity affects both service-providers and users [as] organisations which have to work across others’ boundaries inevitably find it harder to form effective partnerships. In the same situation, citizens may find it confusing to understand which organisation is supposed to serve them, and harder to hold them to account. (Welsh Government, 2014, p. 32)

These statements are, of course, a result of those processes identified by Storper (2014), but an obsession with boundaries, as opposed to an examination of the geographies of flows that produce and reproduce the various territorial shapes of contemporary Wales in this case, hides the interrelated complexities that the Williams Commission sought to uncover. This is evident in a key statement on page 35 of their report—‘It is beyond our remit to consider detailed working practices within specific services; and there may well be sound operational reasons for these boundaries’ (Welsh Government, 2014, p. 35). Perhaps if policy-makers had read Storper's paper and the earlier book, the Welsh Government would realize the somewhat futile nature of this endeavor and the roles that it plays in displacing attention away from pressing post-crash economic and social concerns.

Patel-Campillo, Delessio-Parson, and Smith pick up notions of opportunities and negotiations, which helps to define axes of relational autonomy, in a paper that makes a significant contribution to our understandings of regulation and governance. This is concerned with the social organization of markets involving the state, civil society and a range of economic actors with a concern in regulatory frameworks (license and control systems) for alcohol governance in California and Pennsylvania over time (Patel-Campillo et al., 2014).

By deploying a methodology able to unpack the temporal sequencing of national legislative events and their ‘local’ translation at state-levels for the wine alcohol market pre- and post-prohibition, the processes revealed in these two American states are deeply geographical and indicate the importance of path dependency, bedding-down and ‘institutional sedimentation’, in this case the roles played by differential sets of social relations in creating distinctive institutional architectures of governance. The authors introduce two concepts to explore this: ‘regulatory ambiguity’ to capture moments of uncertainty that precede a shift in existing norms and rules governing economic space and ‘institutional footholds’ to note mechanisms used to create spaces of political traction and opportunity within the state apparatus (Patel-Campillo et al., 2014). In California the wine industry effectively utilized ‘institutional footholds’, such as lobbying and adopting a mutually beneficial business model for business and policy/decision-makers, to influence the decision to adopt a private license system, whereas in Pennsylvania this was not possible due to government-wine industry relations. The wine sector in Pennsylvania declined and it took decades to re-emerge. The temporal differences in relational autonomy are clearly evident and the concepts of ‘institutional sedimentation’, ‘institutional footholds’, and ‘regulatory ambiguity’ can be used in other empirical contexts to explore the uneven development of territory, politics, governance interactions (and building on the ‘governance geographies of neoliberalism’ interventions—see Peck, 1998, 2013; Brenner et al., 2009).

The meticulously researched essay by Clark and Monk (2014), building on a long tradition of not just work on ‘local autonomy’ and public policy (see above) but also ‘pension fund capitalism’ (Clark, 2000), also seeks to tease out US state-level differences, here in the provision and uptake of financial services. The authors are interested in the variegated geographies of US state and local public employee retirement systems (PERS), which utilize various models of contracting out and these differ both within and across states according to the roles played by investment management agreements (IMAs). Clark and Monk focus on the Illinois and Chicago-areas PERS to highlight not just the processes of contracting out through IMAs but also the detailed forms that these contracts take and how pre-contact screening of potential suppliers effectively ‘sterilizes’ investment manager services. This micro-geography of process and practice, an ‘institutional ecology’ (Clark and Monk, 2014) of what Clark (1992) previously called ‘real regulation’, is important and also features in ongoing research undertaken by Raco (2013) on the Private Sector Finance Initiative. These are future research areas that Territory, Politics, Governance wishes to engage with.

The next two essays offer different in-depth scholarly takes on the geographical relationships between relational autonomy and ‘rights to the city’—in one case, two trailer encampments in neoliberal Berlin (Van Schipstal and Nicholls, 2014) and in another, three urban villages in China (Zhu, 2014). Van Schipstal and Nicholls chart a relational approach somewhere between cooptation and autonomy and importantly look at how activists ‘carve out political space’, the form of which is conditioned by the urban historical context of the city in question. Geography matters! Activist-residents in Berlin are witnessed to be working with the grain of the ‘creative city’ discourses in one place, and in another place struggling with the creative class. In the former, citizenship rights are selectively obtained but also run the risk of reproducing a neoliberal subjectivity of individuality and competitiveness that ultimately leads to marginalization and displacement. This give-and-take of local autonomy under the current phase of neoliberalism raises serious issues for politics and territory at a variety of spatial scales and we welcome future contributions on this. Indeed, Merrifield has suggested that ‘[w]hat matters most of all is surely whether people engage in effective action. And if actions are politically effective, we might want to pinpoint the conditions for their effectiveness’ (Merrifeld, 2014, p. xvii, emphasis original).

Zhu picks up on the importance of state, market, and civil society interactions for understanding contemporary capitalism, city-making, and urban autonomy. This essay offers a deep insight into China's rapid market-orientated urban experience and particularly how the city–rural migration interface operates unequally for land possession and dispossession. The modified Lefebvrian notion of ‘right to city space’ is used to frame a dynamic between practices of city space, first ‘appropriation’ and second ‘participation’, which is highly selective according to a rigid hukou dual-track household registration system (Zhu, 2014). China operates an ‘internal passport system’, with four acknowledged hukou groups, almost mirroring Clark’s (1984) typologies of local autonomy: urban natives with local non-agricultural hukou, urban migrants with non-local urban hukou, rural natives with local agriculture hukou, and rural migrants with non-local agriculture hukou. This ‘land-centred politics’ maximizes the exchange value of land and in turn defines the unequal rights to city space of different social groups.

The concluding paper by Henry is an important reminder of the centrality of time and temporality in any understandings of autonomy and the geographies of territory, politics, and governance (Henry, 2014). This picks up and runs with the governmentality and territory baton that has been prominent in the social sciences (Hannah, 2000) and unpacked systematically in the pages of Territory, Politics, Governance (Elden, 2013a). Henry is illuminating in highlighting seventeenth century preventative ‘practices of ratio’ in classifying and quantifying land and people as ‘enjoined objects’, which predates later concerns with more calculative and enabling biopolitical motives of territory-making that feature in the key governmentality literatures of Foucault and others (Elden, 2013b). More specifically the essay interrogates the Sir William Petty Down Survey of Ireland in 1655 as a critical historical episode where population and territory emerged before the epoch of governmentality, producing a form of territory grounded in preventative politics. In doing this, it seriously questions the ‘what time’ (Jones, 2004) assumptions that we make in the social sciences to frame our core objects of enquiry.