Peripheral Vision: LEVELLING UP

what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, May 2, 2024

LEVELLING UP

Paul Collier is an Establishment economist who delivered this lecture in 2022 which is well worth viewing in its entirety and nudged me to some thoughts. Briefly his presentation argued that -

Areas do not stabilise through the working of the market but rather

intensify existing social, political problems

3 new social sciences can help us better to deal with regional disparities –

evolutionary social psychology, moral philosophy (mutual trust) and decisions under uncertainty

a chart on “intergenerational earnings elasticity”(!!)  shows the scale of

what Britain and Italy are up against, with each having only 50% social mobility but Denmark 15%

the importance of local context and of local leadership – rather than

the “best practice” favoured by international banks

```
the need to learn from others 
```

and to “cross the river by touching the next stone” (as  Deng Xiaoping

put it) that is, to learn from practical experience

Clearly I very much agree with his caustic dismissal of mainstream economics but to talk these days about local context is to engage in a similar discourse to that of “apply pie and motherhood” – it has become the everyone’s mantra. But it does need to be challenged not least because it has become, in many places, a recipe for (and rationalisation of) corruption

The December 2019 UK General Election brought Boris Johnson to power and saw many Labour seats in the North of Englsnd switch to Conservative (the famous Red Wall). And this was duly followed a couple of years later by the White Paper on Levelling Up the UK - arguably the most important spatial policy document for more than 80 years

Recommended Reading

Reframing development for “left-behind” places 2022

levelling up in the UK

According to Mazzucato and Dibb (2019), a mission-based policy should be characterized by three features: strategic orientation (direction, legitimacy), policy coordination (horizontal and vertical), and effective implementation (mix of interventions, appropriate funding and learning). There are reasons to doubt whether the mission-orientated LUWP satisfactorily meets these criteria. First, in terms of strategic orientation, each mission should be based on an inspirational aim that encourages private, voluntary and public sector groups to collaborate and innovate to resolve the problem and meet the target. Choosing the right goal is fundamental as missions depend on having legitimacy and something that all groups can ‘buy into’. Only some of the proposed missions come close to this sense of direction. The adoption of a missions approach suggests that policy should not be top-down, but instead co-created by actors at different levels, so that the eventual mix of policy instruments and schemes emerges from a process of joint working and collaboration. There is an evident contradiction here, however as most of the proposed levelling up funds are to be implemented in a primarily top-down and conditional manner.