Relaunching Regional Economic-Development Policy and Planning for Auckland: Remaking the State and Contingent Governance under Neoliberalism

Abstract

Neoliberalisation in New Zealand has been driven further as a political project than in most other countries. After two decades of neoliberal economic policy, it is possible to examine how political-economic actors in subnational spaces have responded to vastly new conditions. I provide an account on how regional economic-development policy and planning has reappeared in Auckland in the postrestructuring period. By deploying relational^institutional and poststructural perspectives in the examination of key policy initiatives that coconstituted an emerging regional economic intervention trajectory, I discuss how economic governance has been assembled, assess its structural coherence and directionality, and analyse the role of the state. I argue that regional governance processes are characterised by contingencies, patterns of institutional experimentation, and, increasingly, the work of central state actors. What is not known to date, however, is whether new regulatory structures are having any major material effects on the course of New Zealand's largest regional economy.

Regional Economic Policy ‘In-the-Making’: Imaginaries, Political Projects and Institutions for Auckland's Economic Transformation

“…Instead, envisaged transformations can be imagined and explored more openly. For example, understandings of current policy practices such as benchmarking and`indicatorisation' as governmental techniques that formed the bread and butter work of interventions [as observed in the AREDS, CA, and Metropolitan Auckland initiatives, as well as a growing part of work in councils, and continued by the Government Urban Economic Development Office (GUEDO)] can facilitate the search for measuring how economic and noneconomic Our research shows that a key rationale for the contemporary assemblage of REP arrangements in the Auckland context lies in the increasing resource interdependencies amongst governing interests (Wetzstein, 2008b). Actors rely heavily on accessing governing resources that are distributed among other actors.…”

Urban Economic Governance, Business and Globalisation: Australasia's ‘Committee‐for‐[City]’ Phenomenon

“…Importantly, and in contrast to hierarchical notions of governance, power is construed as shifting and contested outcome of ongoing and contingent material‐discursive alignments and strategic coupling processes. In regards to UEG questions, PSPE highlights the centrality of a perspective of situated practice to an understanding of urban politics as relational compositions, or assemblages (McGuirk ), while it engages with the contingencies, contradictions and constraints of urban policy‐making in territorial contexts (Wetzstein ). This body of literature asks how UEG is constituted and reconstituted by time‐ and place‐specific assemblages of material and discursive governing resources such as narratives, benchmarks, indicators, political power, funding commitments and access to networks.…”

Globalising Economic Governance, Political Projects, and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

“…The intriguing question of how governing is achieved at all spatial scales under conditions of a financially constrained public sector, largely market‐driven development, rising global interdependencies, and increasing discursive complexity benefits from a post‐structural political economy perspective (PSPE) (Larner and Le Heron, 2002b; Wetzstein, 2008a). This approach is sensitive to the emergent contingent alignments, regularities, arrangements, and constitutive effects of multiple interventions as it pays ‘attention to both the discursive and material, to the politicised and discursive construction of knowledge and to the material and institutional contexts of economic processes’ (McGuirk and Dowling, 2009, 124).…”

“…Auckland (population: 1.4 million), is New Zealand's economic centre and gateway to the world. Today, it is perceived as New Zealand's only global city and therefore deserving of particular political and policy attention (Wetzstein, 2008a). Perth (population: 1.7 million) is the most isolated capital city in the world.…”