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
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