Combined Authorities and material participation: The capacity of Green Belt to engage political publics in England

The aim of this paper is to consider the passions aroused by Green Belts in their urban containment function as a political accomplishment that has the capacity to orient publics around new spaces of governance. The paper addresses what it identifies as a problem of relevance in the new Combined Authorities in England where public identity and belonging may be more firmly rooted in other places and settings. It draws on the literature on material participation to locate the capacity to foster public belonging in objects, things and settings, and considers the environmental planning designation of Green Belt as an assemblage of the human and non-human which has the power to connect and contain. In a case study of plans for Green Belt reduction in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the paper evidences the power of the non-human to mobilise public engagement and to foster territorial identity. The paper concludes by setting out an approach to public participation that foregrounds the importance of material interests and affective relations with objects and things in the formation of political communities

Rescaling employment support accountability: from negative national neoliberalism to positively integrated city-region ecosystems

Waves of successive Devolution Deals are transforming England’s landscape of spatial governance and transferring new powers to city-regions, facilitating fundamental qualitative policy reconfigurations and opening up new opportunities as well as new risks for citizens and local areas. Focused on city-region’s recently emerging roles around employment support policies the article advances in four ways what are currently conceptually and geographically underdeveloped literatures on employment support accountability levers. Firstly, the paper dissects weaknesses in the accountability framework of Great Britain’s key national contracted-out employment support programme and identifies the potential for city-regions to respond to these weaknesses. Secondly, the article highlights the centrality of the nationally neglected network accountability lever in supporting these unemployed individuals and advances this discussion further by introducing to the literature for the first time a conceptual distinction between what we term ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ forms of these accountably levers that currently remain homogenised within the literature. Crucially, the argument sets out for the first time in the literature why analytically it is the positive version of network accountability that is the key – and currently missing at national-level – ingredient to the design of effective employment support for the priority group of ‘harder-to-help’ unemployed people who have more complex and/or severe barriers to employment. Thirdly, the paper argues from a geographical perspective that it is city-regions that are uniquely positioned in the English context to create the type of positively networked integrated employment support ‘ecosystem’ that ‘harder-to-help’ individuals in particular require. Finally, the discussion situates these city-region schemes within their broader socio-economic and political context and connects with broader debates around the lurching development of neoliberalism. In doing so it argues that whilst these emerging city-region ecosystem models offer much progressive potential their relationship to the problematic neoliberal employment support paradigm remains uncertain given that they refine, embed and indeed buttress that same neoliberal employment policy paradigm rather than fundamentally challenging or stepping beyond it