Local governance, the crises of Fordism and the changing geographies of regulation

During the last fifteen years the local government system in Britain has been transformed into one of local governance in which a multitude of unelected agencies (public, private and voluntary) have become involved in attempting to influence the fortunes of local areas. In this paper, we locate the roots of this shift in the crisis of the Fordist mode of regulation and political responses to it, suggest that a reworked regulation theory can provide a useful perspective from which to interpret current changes and outline the research framework that such a perspective involves. Although a key role for local government in Fordist processes of regulation may be identified, it is doubtful that new forms of local governance are contributing to the emergence of stable regulation in the 1990s. One reason for this is the geographical differentiation of contemporary regulatory processes.