John Fenwick - Public Enterprise and Local Place: New Perspectives on Theory and Practice

This book presents key aspects of contemporary local government and public enterprise, drawing together the challenges for local governance in the practice of public entrepreneurship and its response to collaboration, place and place-making. Specifically, this book includes the impact of local partnerships and public entrepreneurs in local policy implementation.

It is written by established authors bringing together their experience and practice of local partnerships and public entrepreneurship in place-based strategies, and will be of value to local government, new forms of enterprise partnerships, wider agencies and public entrepreneurship scholars as well as policymakers responsible for implementation of place-based regeneration.

This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners in public administration, business administration, local government, entrepreneurship and public sector management, and more broadly to those with interests in public policy, business and management, political science, economics, urban studies and geography.

John Fenwick is Professor Emeritus of Public Management at the Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK.

Lorraine Johnston is Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Enterprise at the Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK.

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Public Enterprise and Local Place

New Perspectives on Theory and Practice

John Fenwick and Lorraine Johnston

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Governance-and-Public-Policy/book-series/GPP

New Perspectives on Theory and Practice

John Fenwick and Lorraine Johnston

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 John Fenwick and Lorraine Johnston

The right of John Fenwick and Lorraine Johnston to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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ISBN: 978-0-8153-6293-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-11099-0 (ebk)

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In writing this book we depended on the support of many others. We wish to acknowledge in particular the encouragement received from Andrew Taylor, our publisher at Routledge, and the efforts of Sophie Iddamalgoda, senior editorial assistant, to keep things on track and to deadline. Our thoughts have been influenced by countless interviews and conversations with public sector managers and elected members over the years, and we hope our work will be of value and interest to them as well as to academic audiences. This is a challenging time to work in the local public sector, in a hostile economic and political environment, and we unapologetically write from a position of sympathy with and support for those men and women charged with the task of delivering vital public services to all of us.

John Fenwick and Lorraine Johnston

Newcastle upon Tyne 2019

In this book we take a critical look at closely related aspects of contemporary public policy around the core concept of public enterprise, a term which denotes the entrepreneurial work of the public sector and its partners in securing economic growth and development, regeneration and well-being. Our analysis will take us through the realm of innovation and the governance structures that have been used in supporting it. There is a particular focus upon partnership working in fostering public enterprise, and we begin to identify ways in which the balance of the public and private sectors has changed. We then consider the importance of local place, a term which captures the territorial location of public enterprise more accurately than the traditional designation local government, and which recognises the porous and contested boundaries of what was previously a stable institution of local administration. Our focus is on international examples of the processes we describe, towards an overall depiction of how we can now understand both public enterprise and how it is led, for instance by directly elected mayors. Throughout, there is a twin concern with theory and with practice, and with structure and agency, in making sense of local public enterprise today.

The first aim of the book is a relatively modest (though hitherto neglected) one, and that is the task of clarification, in which we seek to cut through some of the terms frequently used in local public policy such as devolution or leadership and examine them for what they are, suggesting that on close examination such terms, although not without meaning, tend to mean less than they initially seem.

The second aim of the book is more ambitious, offering a way forward in understanding the overall topic in two senses. The first sense is a practical one, examining good practice within the local public sector and suggesting that the publicprivate partnerships with which we have all become familiar can be recast along more constructive lines, again referring to positive international examples rather than the dispiriting experience of the public sector merely underwriting private sector failures. The second sense is a theoretical one, offering our conception of a New Public Enterprise (NPE), which seeks to advance current debates about power, institutions and locality, together with the future role of the local public sector, within a new theoretical framework.