Strategic Co-ordination: Hidden Hand or Talking Shop?

Abstract

The previous chapter set out the different activities occurring under the new governance of the English regions. Of the ‘three pillars’, strategic co-ordination or regional strategy-making is the most significant. It is through regional strategy-making that the institutions that are of the region as well as in it achieve limited influence over regional and central policy making. This chapter sets out the various strategy-making processes that take place in the English regions, and argues that the rise of the number of strategy documents that are written and published derives mainly from the pressures towards planning postulated in Chapter 5. This is a belief, located in the collective psyche of the Labour Party (and which distinguishes it from its political opponents) that organised, high-level policy planning is both a precondition of efficient policy-making and indispensable to achieving the redistributive goals of a centre-left party.