IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirc/v43y2025i2p387-405.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Levelling Up, affective governance and tensions within ‘pride in place’

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Howcroft
  • Nicky Marsh
  • Joseph Owen

Abstract

The ‘pride in place’ mission of the UK Government’s Levelling Up agenda has foregrounded the importance of feelings in local and national development strategies. While pride in place gestures to the emotional symptoms of geographical inequality and the so-called left behind, it does not address their structural causes. This article explores how the lens of pride, and the affective governance it demands, has been used to reimagine place in UK policy. We argue that governance has taken a therapeutic and palliative turn, and that the pride in place mission obscures ideological inconsistencies in policymaking. The article explains how the government’s narrow conception of pride as a mechanism of affective governance illustrates tensions in places at different scales: between national and local issues; between public and private spheres; and between individual and collective identities. It claims that a more meaningful understanding of pride must be predicated on people’s collective capacity for felt and emotional responses. Crucially, any metrics for pride must capture that complexity to help restore social infrastructure in places.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Howcroft & Nicky Marsh & Joseph Owen, 2025. "Levelling Up, affective governance and tensions within ‘pride in place’," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 43(2), pages 387-405, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:2:p:387-405
    DOI: 10.1177/23996544241268342
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544241268342
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23996544241268342?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:2:p:387-405. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.