Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

Abstract

In this commentary, we argue that augmented concepts and research methods are needed to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschew competition in favour of deal-making between elite state and private actors. Fuelled by financialisation and in response to planning conflict are regulatory reforms that legitimise opaque alliances in service of infrastructure and urban development projects. From a specific city (Sydney, Australia) we draw upon one such reform – Unsolicited Proposals – to point to a broader landscape of hybrid urban governance, its reconfigurations of power and potential effect on cities. Whereas neoliberal governance promotes competition and views the state and private sectors as distinct, hybrid urban governance leverages state monopoly power and abjures market competition, instead endorsing high-level public–private coordination, technical and financial expertise and confidential deal-making over major urban projects. We scrutinise how Unsolicited Proposals normalise this approach. Commercial-in-confidence protection and absent tender processes authorise a narrow constellation of influential private and public actors to preconfigure outcomes without oversight. Such reforms, we argue, consolidate elite socio-spatial power, jeopardise city function and amplify corruption vulnerabilities. To theorise hybrid urban governance at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism, we offer the concepts of coercive monopoly (where market entry is closed, without opportunity to compete) and de jure collusion (where regulation reforms codify informal alliances among elites connected across government and corporate and consultancy worlds). We call for urban scholarship to pay closer attention to public–private hybridisation in governance, scrutinising regulatory mechanisms that consecrate deal-making and undermine the public interest.

Deals and devolution: The role of local authority deals in undermining devolved decision making

“…For local government, the deals provide the promise of access, influence and additional funding. Whitehall flatters the locality by emphasising this role by appointing former senior Whitehall leaders or advisers to each deal area in a form of coercive monopoly (Gibson et al, 2022). While the Scottish and Welsh governments have been politically obliged to engage in these deals, they have increasingly been seen as mechanisms to undermine devolution (Keating, 2021; Andrews, 2021).…”

Fabrication of space: The design of everyday life in South Korean Songdo

“…The usefulness of this notion as both concept and method invites a parallel focus on ‘seeing like a corporation’. Together they forge a significant hybrid field, one marked by high-level coordination between ‘narrow constellation’ of powers ‘at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism’ (Gibson et al, 2022: 1). What these authors call a new public–private hybridisation ‘exerts a force’ which is sociologically observable in ‘the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities’ (Simone, 2013: 243).…”

“…The effort to provide this missing link responds to two important more generalisable calls, namely (1) the call for ‘augmented concepts and research methods to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschews competition in favour of deal making between elite state and private actors’ (Gibson et al, 2022: 1), and (2) the call for better understanding ‘how humans inhabit their “ecological niches”’ (Rose et al, 2022:1), that is, delineating pathways between altered types of the everyday and new types of governmentality (Rose, 1996; Vanolo, 2014). In particular, we argue that the notion of ‘re-figuration of space’ (Löw and Knoblauch, 2021) helps to close the gap in research and offers a working solution to two aforementioned tasks.…”

Infrastructure in times of exception: Unravelling the discourses, governance reforms and politics in ‘Building Back Better’ from COVID-19

“…Examples include portraying local planning systems as too bureaucratic and slow, and protesters as anti-progress or self-interested. Such claims give support to the creation of parallel national or state level approval processes for fast-tracking infrastructure planning decisions and rescaling planning powers away from local governments ( Gibson et al, 2022 ; McManus and Haughton, 2021 ).…”