Regional Economic Policy ‘in the Making’: Imaginaries, Political Projects and Institutions for Auckland’s Economic Transformation

Abstract

This paper explores the utility of investigating regional economic policy (REP) as constituted through the interplay of imaginaries, political projects, and institutional arrangements. It frames REP in process terms—as continually ‘in-the-making’ and emerging out of the intersecting trajectories of ideas, policy, individuals, and other resources. The empirical focus is economic governance in Auckland, New Zealand, in the years following the widely publicised neoliberal reforms and profound economic restructuring of the 1980s and early 1990s. The analysis draws on the authors’ particular positionality of being involved in knowledge production, both in academic and in policy arenas, and benefits from the development of a range of poststructural political economy methodologies by Auckland-based researchers. The concept of ‘political project’ is argued to be a useful analytical tool for linking circulating academic imaginaries, political initiatives, and particular policy rationales. By means of juxtaposing key aspects of particular economic imaginaries with political/policy initiatives and developments, it is shown that knowledge production for subnational economic governance is coconstitutive, contradictory, occurs on multiple geographical scales, and is mediated and remediated by place-specific and time-specific institutional actors. The methodological strategy of highlighting associations with the potential for interaction, rather than seeking causal processes, not only reveals the politicised nature of contextual facets of contemporary interventions, but promises to make a richer base for exploring possibilities for acting differently in urban and regional policy worlds.