Austerity has been delivered in the UK without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between urban regime theory and Gramsci's theory of the integral state, the article considers how austerity was normalized and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring, and austerity, positioning itself as a multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The article explores historical influences on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity while disorganizing and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past struggles, this process of organized disorganization produced a functional hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of "austerian realism." The article elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to inform further research.
No abstract
The 2008-2009 Global Economic Crisis (GEC) created an opportunity, eagerly seized by many national governments and international organisations, to impose a prolonged, and widespread period of austerity. Austerity is widely recognised to have done enormous damage to social, cultural, political and economic infrastructures in cities and larger urban areas across much of the globe. As the GEC was also the first such crisis in what is widely considered “the urban age”, (COVID-19 merely the latest and worst), austerity measures were chiefly administered through municipal and regional mechanisms. A great deal has been written since the crisis, about the way austerity was experienced, governed, resisted and urbanised. This volume considers these issues anew, by reflecting on the multi-faceted and shape-shifting concept of “collaboration”. It reflects on the theme of collaborative governance, considered from the perspective of resisting austerity, or otherwise finding ways to circumvent or move beyond it. The insights we draw about collaboration are directed towards locating agency found or created in urban arenas, for resisting or transcending austerity. The book draws on insights into austerity governance from comparative research conducted in Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Greater Dandenong (Melbourne), Leicester, Montreal and Nantes.
The 2008 financial crash and ensuing austerity have brought critical perspectives on political economy into academic debates in democratic theory and public administration. One important area of contention regards "collaborative" and "network" forms of governance. Advocates argue that these comprise an epochal shift that resolves many pitfalls of state and market oriented governance, a consensus that was especially popular during the 1990's and early 2000's. This chapter reports research carried out in five cities in Europe (Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Nantes) exploring the impact of austerity politics on the ideology and practice of collaborative governance -would it endure, or be unravelled by, post-crash exposure to austerity and distributional conflict? The chapter concludes that severe austerity erodes the foundations for strong collaborative governance. The inability to survive the return of distributional conflict leads us to conclude that collaborative governance is fully functional only in times of growth.
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