Public entrepreneurship and the politics of regeneration in multi-level governance

Abstract

The paper uses a case study of urban regeneration policy in Sheffield, UK, to explore local public entrepreneurship in a system of multi-level governance. Recent analyses of public entrepreneurs have directed attention to the macro-political structural and institutional conditions that enable and constrain these actors, and to their individual characteristics and attributes. The stress has been on the national level and on individual action at the expense of the agency of local networks of entrepreneurs. In order to address this lacuna, we consider how local policy entrepreneurs work across governance levels and develop ideas, institutional structures and support in pursuit of their goals, using Kingdon's notion of policy streams as a vehicle for our analysis. We highlight the contingent and path-dependent nature of such entrepreneurship. In particular, we identify the temporal sequencing of agenda shifts and entrepreneurial actions as a crucial aspect of the policy process.Keywords Public entrepreneurship, multi-level policy, policy streams, policy windows IntroductionThe dominant narrative of central-local government relations in the UK has been the power of central government to make and remake the institutional landscape and, in so doing, to erode the institutional cohesiveness, policy competences and autonomy of local political institutions (c.f. Pratchett, 2004;Wilson, 2003). However, the past two decades have also seen the advance of multi-level governance (MLG) (Keating, 2014) and increased opportunities for 'authority migration' (Broschek, 2014) to institutional actors at supraand sub-national levels, allowing greater scope for the exercise of local autonomy. The UK's institutional regime is currently the subject of rapid restructuring. Examples of this include the rise of city regions (c.f. Deas, 2014;Etherington and Jones, 2009;Harding, 2007; Harrison, 2010Harrison, , 2012Jonas and Ward, 2007) and institutional innovations such as combined authorities and elected mayors. The implementation of these changes has been selective. The paper explores one explanation for this uneven distribution of powers: public entrepreneurship. While the concept challenges institutionalism's limited treatment of institutional change, accounts often fail properly to locate the actions of entrepreneurs within a context of MLG, restricting our understanding of how such a setting may enable or constrain agency. In a multi-level polity -or more specifically, in policy fields that incorporate institutional actors from many sites -numerous policy processes play out across different levels and are often misaligned. Within the UK, sub-national actors have been firmly subordinate to actors at higher levels and the former are reliant on the latter for resources to devise and implement policies. MLG is a potential alternative source of mobilization by sub-national actors (Marshall, 2005(Marshall, , 2006. Successful entrepreneurship thus depends on how well actors operate within and across governmental levels and the ways in ...

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