Answers to challenges in a changing environment highlight the need to work with a more flexible sense of geography, developing institutional reforms in delivering public services. The emerging city regions in England ...Answers to challenges in a changing environment highlight the need to work with a more flexible sense of geography, developing institutional reforms in delivering public services. The emerging city regions in England can be regarded as a prime test of what the need for optimal territorial scope and enhanced coordination needs. The aim of this paper is to examine the emerging new forms of territorial governance in the light of the "piecemeal" approach of reforms launched by the post-2010 Conservative Liberal Government. We argue that the creation of city-regions is an organic part of the new territorial paradigm; an important element of which is an integrated and functional approach that intersects public administrative borders. Since 2010, the uniformed regional model has been replaced by primarily ad hoc, informal, and flexible approaches. The successive governments placed the bigger cities and its hinterland at the centre of English devolution, but wished to implement them in varying forms of "deal-making" as a means of decentralization, encouraging solutions tailored to local requirements and opportunities, and retaining the fundamental characteristics of the "asymmetrical devolution". However, in terms of regional governance, the relationship between the new and old regional configurations has seen the creation of a much-debated, malleable framework which, during the process of Brexit could generate new, further interpretations, narratives, and practical solutions展开更多
文摘Answers to challenges in a changing environment highlight the need to work with a more flexible sense of geography, developing institutional reforms in delivering public services. The emerging city regions in England can be regarded as a prime test of what the need for optimal territorial scope and enhanced coordination needs. The aim of this paper is to examine the emerging new forms of territorial governance in the light of the "piecemeal" approach of reforms launched by the post-2010 Conservative Liberal Government. We argue that the creation of city-regions is an organic part of the new territorial paradigm; an important element of which is an integrated and functional approach that intersects public administrative borders. Since 2010, the uniformed regional model has been replaced by primarily ad hoc, informal, and flexible approaches. The successive governments placed the bigger cities and its hinterland at the centre of English devolution, but wished to implement them in varying forms of "deal-making" as a means of decentralization, encouraging solutions tailored to local requirements and opportunities, and retaining the fundamental characteristics of the "asymmetrical devolution". However, in terms of regional governance, the relationship between the new and old regional configurations has seen the creation of a much-debated, malleable framework which, during the process of Brexit could generate new, further interpretations, narratives, and practical solutions