Facilitating spaces for place-based leadership in centralized governance systems: the case of Newcastle City Futures

Abstract

This paper explores how distributed and relational forms of place-based leadership can be facilitated in environments with constrained local governance capabilities. It is based on an in-depth case study of a university-hosted collaborative platform situated in a city/regional institutional landscape marked by limited local devolution and public sector austerity. The research contributes to a fuller understanding of place-based leadership by analyzing how actors can mobilize interpretive and network forms of power outside formal governance structures to encourage long-term thinking and broker innovative cross-organizational projects. Equally, however, it highlights their continuing dependence on legitimating forms of local institutional and resource authority.

Building collaborative platforms for urban innovation: Newcastle City Futures as a quadruple helix intermediary

“…In addition, the oversized role traditionally played by the public sector in the region has, over the past decade, been diminished by national government austerity measures. Most notably, this has affected the strategic and delivery capacity of local authorities, creating an institutional vacuum that NCF found itself working to help fill (Vallance et al 2019).…”

“…This paper will help close this gap in the literature through a study of Newcastle City Futures (NCF), a university-led initiative in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Since its inception in 2014, NCF has developed into a collaborative platform for cross-sectoral demonstrator projects that are helping to substantiate a future vision of Newcastle – a former industrial city with enduring socio-economic challenges – as an urban innovation test-bed (Vallance et al, 2019). In NCF’s most recent configuration – as an Urban Living Partnership (ULP) pilot project funded by the UK academic research councils and national innovation agency – it drew on relationships established with a range of stakeholders, as well as academic capabilities across two universities, to help broker a portfolio of these demonstrator projects.…”

Regions in a time of pandemic

“…The research of regional studies will not be easy eitherbut it is important. Regional studies in particular has a set of tools tailored to understanding the spatial (re)distribution of economic activities when exposed to significant shocks (Lovering, 2001;Martin & Sunley, 2015;Pike, 2009) and responses, and critically encompasses place leadership (Beer et al, 2019;Sotarauta, 2018;Vallance et al, 2019). Those tools are needed to tell this story and identify what matters for the recovery from the pandemic and the regional policies required to bridge the gaps in regional systems, networks, institutions and governance revealed by There are also calls for policy responses to the impact of Covid-19 to 'build back better', and the regional studies community will have much to contribute in terms of debates over, for example, green new deals, climate change, sustainable transitions (Gibbs, 2018), governance (Dodds et al, 2020;Fastenrath & Coenen, 2020), the role of state intervention and place-based industrial strategy (Bailey et al, 2020a), as well as regional inequalities and 'levelling up' in the context of the 'geography of discontent' (McCann, 2020)this not least because of the importance of place-based regional policies rather than 'one-size-fitsall' approaches to regional planning (Morrison & Doussineau, 2019).…”

Introduction to city and regional leadership

“…Place leadership may also emerge outside established leadership cadres. Vallance, Tewdwr-Jones andKempton (2019, 1723) show how 'actors can mobilize interpretive and network forms of power outside formal governance structures to encourage long-term thinking and broker innovative cross-organizational projects'. Importantly, they also remind us that informal leadership is dependent on local institutional and resource authorities.…”