Across England, planning and governance modes of regulation of supra-local
development strategies are undergoing important transformations. In
particular, the UK?s Coalition Government, which was has been in office since
2010, has a political and financial mission of rescaling and simplifying
sub-national economic planning. As a consequence of the abandonment of
regional apparatus, which can be understood almost as a ?scorched earth?
approach, a strategic leadership fissure has arisen between national and
local scales of policy. Analyzing the theory and processes of spatial
rescaling, including the emergence of new geographies of governance at the
sub-regional scale, the paper illustrates some of the key opportunities and
dilemmas arising from these ?scalar shifts?. Drawing on the case of Local
Enterprise Partnerships - which are supra-local non-statutory spatial
governance entities - the paper questions whether these new public-private
arrangements present a pragmatic way of resolving the strategic tensions
between elected local authority areas that would otherwise be seriously
ignored in England after regions. The paper examines whether state-led
rescaling in effect provides a new ?cover? for some old politics.
Spatial rescaling of economic planning the English way