How to Put the Power Back – a
Decentralised Model
Associate Professor Paul Collits
Research Director
Economic Development and Enterprise
Collaboration, USQ
The Joke
No need for a joke to start
the presentation as
regional policy in Australia
is itself the joke.
Some Takes on the Regional World
• “In today’s world, we find that it is increasingly
regions that compete – not countries” (McKinsey)
• “Today we live our lives regionally” (Bruce Katz,
Brookings)
• “It is a tricky business to define a region” (Dore and
Woodhill)
• Regions are simply “generalisations of the human
mind” (Walter Isard)
• A region is a process... Not a thing” (Cooke and
Morgan)
Some Takes...
• “A region, someone has wryly observed, is an
area safely larger than the last one to whose
problems we found no solution” (Jane Jacobs)
• Regionalism is “part of an insidious agenda to end
the nation state”, “wasteful, offensive and
ultimately sinister” (A British Observer)
• “Is localism the new regionalism?” (Ward and
Hardy)
• Regionalism is the new black in the USA (see
Drabenstott)
• Declaration: I remain a new regionalism sceptic
Three Types of Regional Governance
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There are three things happening with regional governance
The regional coordination of central government policies
Regional development
Regional planning
All have limitations - involve many layers of interventions
and activity, multiple and complex processes, often
uncoordinated and under-resourced governance and poor
evaluation of interventions
• There is a regional governance deficit
• Too little OR too much regional governance?
The Barriers to Regionalism
• The familiar refrains in Australia – centralism; no regional
government; not in the Constitution; no statutory basis to regional
organisations; no local taxing powers – hence no mandate
• Other problems – regional Australia is obsessed with, well, regional
Australia, not with regions
• Regional collaboration remains an unnatural act between nonconsenting adults
• Fragile, possibly false, consensus over regional scale
• Regions are largely top down constructs in Australia
• Fragmented, messy arrangements
• Silos matter – few incentives to own joint projects
• So... Putting the power back is not simple and centralisation is not
the only problem
Overcoming the Barriers – Broad
Scenarios
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3 options
Business as usual
Process improvement
Process re-engineering
But... Is it a process problem? And who takes
responsibility?
• Must government drive it? What about civic
entrepreneurship?
• Urgent need to define “reach”
• Are spatial constructs like regions themselves clunky
and outdated? eg by the new mobility?
Overcoming the Barriers – A
Decentralised Model
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Abolish RDAs and start again?
Let regions define regions
Don’t be hung up on new regionalist memes
Make the case that ‘regions’ are where it is at
Look at the old and new UK models
Address the lack-of-mandate issue
Governments to commit to genuine localism/regionalism, not
localism/regionalism-lite
Reward collaboration
Resource new bodies (which could be old RDAs)
Let new bodies decide on AND fund regional priorities
Remove oversight from Ministers – a regions commission?
Resource research on drivers and models of collaboration – a project for
RUN?? Or RAI??