• Title of article

    In what sense ‘spaces of neoliberalism’? The new localism, the new politics of scale, and town twinning

  • Author/Authors

    Nick Clarke، نويسنده ,

  • Issue Information
    روزنامه با شماره پیاپی سال 2009
  • Pages
    12
  • From page
    496
  • To page
    507
  • Abstract
    This paper draws on a study of town twinning in Britain since 1945 to engage with narratives of ‘the new localism’ and ‘the new politics of scale’. It argues that town twinning is often used in technical assistance programmes such as the UK Governmentʹs Know How Fund and various schemes of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. ‘Fast policy’ is a concept that can be usefully applied to these programmes and the broader field of interurban networking, urban policy mobility, and policy transfer. Town twinning plays an active yet overlooked role in fast policy. The paper also argues that town twinning is part of a longer history of bottom-up localism that includes the political arguments of John Stuart Mill, at least two moments of twentieth-century municipal internationalism, the municipal foreign policy movement of the 1980s, and the community development movement of the last three decades. This longer history suggests sources of localism other than statecraft, and problematises the conceptualisation of power and periodisation of history found in regulation theories of devolution.
  • Keywords
    Sister cities , Technical Assistance , The new localism , The new politics of scale , Town twinning , Fast policy
  • Journal title
    Political Geography
  • Serial Year
    2009
  • Journal title
    Political Geography
  • Record number

    1292891