Conferences, award ceremonies and the showcasing of ‘best practice’: A case study of the annual European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels

Abstract

This paper makes the case that conferences and award ceremonies are important means through which best practices are presented as being successful, transferable and transformative. To do this, it draws on the expanding literature on policy mobilities and a case study of the European Week of Regions and Cities conference and one of the centrepieces at the conference, the RegioStars awards ceremony. Organised by public bodies within the European Union and European Commission, these events take place annually in Brussels, and focus on best practice in regional and urban policy. The paper elaborates on its main argument in three ways. The first is that award ceremonies and conferences shape and are shaped by institutional, spatial and scalar dynamics. The second being that learning and educating are central to the performance of conferences, award ceremonies and the associated mobilisation of policies. The third argument is that such events have important consequences for those hosting the events.Every October over 5000 people gather in Brussels to attend the European Week of Regions and Cities conference, an event that is regularly promoted as being the place to share knowledge and best practice about regional and urban policy. A centrepiece of the annual European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC) conference is the RegioStars awards ceremony which rewards those deemed to be best practice in a variety of categories within regional and urban policy. Sometimes mundane and sometimes with a hint of glamour, the EWRC conference and the RegioStars ceremony are important political events. They are not, however, the only conference and award ceremony that focus on urban and regional policy, inside and outside of the EU borders. In fact, conferences and awards are ubiquitous across many social domains (Craggs and Mahony, 2014;Frey and Gallus, 2017) with the presentation of awards often central parts of conferences.As this paper demonstrates, conferences and award ceremonies are commonly used means through which 'best practices' are anointed and showcased, with conferences and award ceremonies playing important roles in shaping best practice and promoting the selected few as transportable and effective. They are important events in the wider circulation of policies. It is surprising, therefore, that while a burgeoning literature has emerged on policy mobilities (e.g. Craggs and Neate, 2017;McCann, 2011;Peck and Theodore, 2015;Temenos and McCann, 2013; Temenos et al., 2018), the roles of awards within policy mobilitisation has received no detailed academic examination, and the role of conferences within policy mobilisation has only been subject to two studies thus far (Cook and Ward, 2012;Temenos, 2016). This paper begins to address this important gap by examining the staging of the EWRC conference and the RegioStars awards ceremony, neither of which have featured significantly in the wider academic literature. It will illustrate how this conference and award ceremony is staged and how as part of this staging best practice is s...

Policy mobilities as informal processes: evidence from “creative city” policy-making in Gdańsk and Stockholm

“…The significance of recognizing individual agency also opens up the perspective that "arriving at" the mobile can be a rather less organized and certainly less formal process than is often portrayed, for example by perspectives which emphasize more formal "informational infrastructures" (Andersson & Cook, 2019). Policy-making is actually increasingly being "stretched over" multiple, ephemeral, formal and informal/ad hoc networks and relationships and loose connections of differing intensities.…”

“…To do this the analysis thus extends understandings of the role of relatively neglected informal practices and processes and how they mutually support the more studied formal parts of the "informational infrastructures" (Andersson & Cook, 2019;McCann, 2008McCann, , 2011 underpinning policy mobilities. In drawing attention to the diversity of ways in which cities "learn" from other places and demonstrating the centrality of people as mobile agents mobilizing policy themselves, the paper shows that the less formal aspects of policy-mobilities are not simply characteristics of cities in the Global South, but play an important role in a range of different contexts and are demanding of further analysis.…”

“…1) Temporality, formal and informal processes and the long-term processes of policy-making Engagement with formal "informational infrastructures" (Andersson & Cook, 2019) has played an important role in policy mobilities in both cities. Parts of the urban administration in Stockholm have been members of international networks like Eurocities from the mid-1990s.…”

“…Involvement in formal networks and events is thus important for both cities, and adds emphasis to the importance of studying these kinds of formal learning spaces which make up "informational infrastructures" (Andersson & Cook, 2019).…”

“…Temenos and McCann (2013, p. 347) therefore argue for detailed empirical analyses of the contexts and practices of policy mobilization or, in Ward's (2018, p. 279) words, more emphasis on understanding "the systems of comparing, borrowing, exchanging, imitating, learning, reinterpreting and translating"key processes which shape how cities are rendered comparable and how policy-makers learn. Literature has focused on the formal nature of these processes, particularly formal networks (Temenos & McCann, 2013), conferences, study tours (or "policy tourism" -González, 2011), meetings with mobile policy consultants (Prince, 2014), and award ceremonies as key sites in "informational infrastructures" (Andersson & Cook, 2019;Cook & Ward, 2012;McCann, 2008McCann, , 2011. Andersson and Cook (2019) make the point that the ways in which policy-makers learn about other places and mobilize these ideas into forms of mobile policy often occurs in these informational infrastructures, spaces in which, often through formal educational experiences (visits, seminars, expert meetings etc.…”