Governing industrial policy: the scope and limits of the ‘good governance’ agenda

One of the most ubiquitous mantras in industrial policy circles is that ‘good governance’ is critical to the success of economic development strategies. In this chapter we critically examine the ‘good governance agenda’ at the sub-national level, where conventional wisdom often attributes the shortcomings of regional institutions to the regions themselves. To explore this issue we focus on two case studies. The first is Valencia, in Spain, where a coalition of regional banks and national political parties propelled the region into a prolonged crisis. The second is post-Brexit Britain, where the central state is undermining the devolution settlements agreed with the Celtic nations, triggering an unprecedented crisis of governance in the UK’s multilevel polity. Our analysis underlines the need to take multi-scalar political relationships more seriously in the design and delivery of place-based industrial policy.