Making space for competition: The rationalities of contemporary regional development

Abstract

Taking as its starting premise that we have a politics of space because space is political at the level of ontology, this article investigates how the governing of regional development is guided by a set of prominent political rationalities that revolve around the notions of competition and competitiveness. To this end, I mobilise the Foucauldian framework of governmentality to provide empirical illustrations drawn from a 5-year long research project concerning globalisation in Swedish sub-national regions. These illustrations show how regions are governed through rationalities that stress adaptability, attraction, environment and sustainability as well as leadership in order to prevail in their inevitable competition for vital resources. I argue that as these chains of rationale are put into motion in the contemporary politics of space, they not only promote specific and particular ways of developing regions, but also displace certain practices and objects from the realm of the political to the realm of a natural order. I therefore conclude that current expressions of the politics of space have strong tendencies to deny its own political foundations. Instead, competition and competitiveness are inscribed as naturally occurring features in social relations, thereby elevating their importance in the creation of new sub-national spaces.