The neighbourhood has been a prominent terrain for revitalization in recent times, and also for studies by scholars debating the significance of networked governance as the means of public service coordination, democratic voice or social control. This study of the governance of neighbourhoods in...

New Labour's third White Paper promised the revitalization of local government after ten years of control freakery. It does not, however, live up to the promise of a ‘new localism' (Stoker and Wilson, 2004). The tenor of the paper is moralizing and prescriptive, claims to a new approach belied...

This paper develops a distinct perspective on the continuities and contrasts between Thatcherite Conservatism and New Labour, interpreted through active citizenship policy. Revisiting Thatcherism, it argues that the roots of the New Labour approach to active citizenship can be traced to the...

This entry comprises the preliminaries and introduction to my book, to be published by Policy Press in September 2011, titled Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. The following text appears on the back cover. Theories heralding the rise of network governance have dominated...

This short paper was produced as a Research Briefing for Leicester Business School in May 2012. It explores the rise of 'horizontalism' as a hegemonic world view and then discusses its limits, applying Gramsci's theory of the integral state. The paper suggests that the concept of a 'governance...

This study compares and contrasts urban regeneration partnerships in the UK with urban regimes in the USA. It is argued that regime theory, as developed by Elkin and Stone, neither describes nor explains the contrasting forms of collaboration in the UK. The development of urban regeneration...

Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory...

This paper explores neoliberalisation and its counter-currents through a six-case study of austerity urbanism in Spain and the UK. Applying Urban Regime Theory it highlights the role of urban politics in driving, variegating and containing neoliberalism since the 2008 crash. Variegated austerity...

"Does politics matter" is an enduring question in urban studies. This paper contributes to the debate by exploring the agency of city leaders in local economic development policy in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Leeds (UK). In place of the conventional (and valid) focus on structural...