Search

Previous research has often linked socioeconomic decline and 'left behind' places with out‐migration and depopulation. Few analyses have reflected on the role of connectivity in the migratory system, and how this varies across groups and places to produce peripheralisation. Using detailed migration in England and Wales, we examine the level of spatial focusing of migration flows between local authority origins and destinations, using the Gini index. The study extends the established spatial focusing literature to consider the role of age and investigates the phenomenon in 'left behind' places. Our findings show the complexity of the role of migration in the production of left behind places, with implications for population redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devolution has become a key 'global trend' over recent decades as many states have decentralised power to sub-state governments. The UK resisted this trend until the late 1990s when devolution was enacted by the then Labour Government, taking a highly asymmetrical form in which different territories have been granted different powers and institutional arrangements. Devolution allows the devolved governments to develop policies that are tailored to the needs of their areas, encouraging policy divergence, although this is countered by pressures to ensure that devolved approaches do not contradict those of the central state, promoting convergence. This review paper aims to assess the unfolding dynamics of devolution and policy divergence in the UK, spanning different policy areas such as economic development, health and social policy. The paper emphasises that devolution has altered the institutional landscape of public policy in the UK, generating some high-profile examples of policy divergence, whilst also providing evidence of policy convergence. In addition, the passage of time underlines the nature of UK devolution as an unfolding process. Its underlying asymmetries have become more pronounced as the tendency towards greater autonomy for Scotland and Wales clashes with a highly centralised mode of policymaking in Westminster, the consequences of which have spilt over into the devolved territories in the context of the post-2007 economic crisis through public expenditure cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan 'British Jobs for British Workers' in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter-related arguments. First, we contend that it is necessary to interrogate the spatialised power relations generated through particular forms of labour agency enacted in relation to globalising processes. Second, since these responses can be politically ambiguous, success in territorially based disputes does not always equate with broader (transnational) class agency. Third, relevant to the project of labour geography, we propose that labour scholars and activists be more attuned to the mundane ambiguities in labour agency, and the subsequent need to frame local action within a broader relational politics of global labour solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the political aspects of boundary crossings. The author discusses the prevalence of localism which has been part of every government's agenda, particularly in Great Britain. The author tackles the geographical notion of such political view. The government's goal for progressive localism is also discussed.

The term 'filling in' was developed in the context of research into UK devolution in order to move beyond the literature on the 'hollowing out' of the national state. We critically unpack the concept of filling in and assess its value, identifying three main ambiguities. First, we emphasise the need to distinguish between what we term structural and relational forms of filling in, ensuring a clear analytical separation between structure and agency. Second, we examine the associated scalar politics of devolution, arguing that filling in and hollowing out are not scale-specific processes. Third, we distinguish between filling in as originally advanced, which is time-specific in relation to the process of devolution, and 'pure' forms of filling in which can be seen as time-neutral. In abstracting filling in from the context of devolution in this way, our purpose is to render it capable of wider application to the study of other processes of state restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre-existing institutional arrangements (, Space and Polity 2:5-31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub-national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's 'new state spaces' (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path-dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of 'regional armatures' and 'the politics of scale' to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that 'form' and 'mould' particular spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A renewed interest in the spatial clustering or agglomeration of economic activity is evident within economic geography and related fields. This paper considers processes of change within ‘mature’ regional clusters, developing a conceptual framework which links firm-level strategies to development scenarios at the cluster level through a set of intervening mechanisms. We distinguish between two development scenarios: renewal which involves significant change, enabling the cluster to sustain its prosperity, and adjustment which is associated with stagnation and gradual decline. This conceptual framework is applied to an analysis of one key mechanism of change, diversification, as pursued by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Aberdeen oil cluster. Our analysis indicates that some diversification is occurring, with the implications for the cluster lying midway between adjustment and renewal. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to assess and ‘unpack’ the clusters concept and suggest that research should focus on the relationships between proximity, learning and evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]