Economic Governance for a Globalising Auckland? Political Projects, Institutions and Policy

Abstract

In the context of a peripheral, small and largely resource-based economy, New Zealand’s economic policy makers have for long faced the key challenge of influencing global connections of local actors in value-adding activities. This dissertation seeks to interpret the nature and trajectories of governance activities relating to economic processes in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city-region, in the 1990’s and 2000’s. This period, a time of neoliberalising political-economic conditions following intensive economic restructuring in the 1980s, saw a re-entry of central government to the governing landscape of Auckland. The research focuses on how regional actors such as the Auckland Regional Growth Forum, the Auckland Regional Economic Development Strategy and the business-driven initiatives of ‘Competitive Auckland’, ‘Committee for Auckland’ and the ‘Knowledge Wave’ conferences, gradually became aligned with an emerging governmental project from central government that re-defined perceptions of and expectations about Auckland’s economic role. The research approach is informed by several literatures, especially those of the regulation, actor-network and governmentality schools. The different questions that spring from these literatures enable scrutiny of Auckland’s institutional developments in terms of the identification of interdependencies amongst governing interests, the nature and degree of mediation of investment processes from institutional experimentation and the possible emergence of effects from new governance arrangements. The thesis situates and uses the policy and academic positioning of the researcher to develop methodologies to interrogate the emergence of the material and discursive dimensions of the regional economic governance framework of Auckland. This thesis argues that ongoing institutional experimentation has been both a pre-cursor to and an active ingredient in the re-appearance of the New Zealand central state in Auckland’s economic governance. Importantly, governing is increasingly complex; and about mobilising a range of actors by influencing their perceptions about governing and investment goals through discursive governance practices. In this context, current socio-economic interventions can be best understood as contingent assemblages of governing resources, producing discursive alignments of interests that lead to a re-working of processes and practices of the state-regulatory apparatus. The effects of the institutional developments on private investment decisions are largely unknown however. While the emerging institutional framework for economic governance involving Auckland is increasingly embracing Auckland’s globalising character, influencing the city-region’s economic participation in the globalising world economy may be harder to achieve as a political project than current policy rhetoric implies. Theoretically, this research challenges territorial conceptualisations of political economic management and contributes to the wider development of a relational-institutional framework for understanding sub-national economic governance. Auckland, globalising economic processes, economic governance, state, institutions, policy, knowledge, contingency, regulation, discourses