Re-Stating the problem of regulation and re-regulating the local state

Abstract

In recent years a substantial body of literature has grown up around the application of the theorectical insights of regulation theory to the evolution of patterns of local governance and the structures of the local state (Geddes 1988: Goodwin, Duncan and Halford 1993; Painter 1991: Peck and Tickell 1992: Stocker 1989 inter alia). These new patterns of local governance are characteristically seen to be associated with the replacement of the formallly accountable, democracitcally elected structures of local government with a plethora of unaccountable and non-elected agencies involving public-private sector ‘part-nership’, Within this literature the emergence of new patterns of local governance is accounted for in terms of a response to the crisis of Fordism. In this article it is argued that regulation theory's principal analytical strength lies in its analysis of the internal contradictions and dynamics of modes of regulation, but that it has thus far failed to develop an adequate explanation of the transition between modes. As a consequence, existing accounts of the emergence of new modes of local governance couched in terms of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or after-Fjordism) have tended to fail to reveal the complex mechanisms and processes linking global economic dynamics and the transformation of the structures of the national and local state. By interrogating the concept of ‘crisis’ in regulation theory and by considering the processing of the failures of Foprdism through the state at national and local level as a condition of any response to crisis, it is hoped to begin to develop a theory of the transition between modes of regulation. Such a theory, as it is hoped to demonstrate, might provide the basis for a more nuanced understanding of the complex process and mechanism resulting in the transformation of political and economic structures at the local level.

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