Nationally significant? Major infrastructure projects, central-local relations and municipal statecraft and scalecraft in England

In England, since 2008, some categories of infrastructure project have been defined as ‘nationally significant’ and consented through a central state-led system rather than through the traditional local state town and country planning process. When introduced, there was little focus on the role of the local state in this new Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project regime which, if discussed at all, was often described as diminished. Drawing on our own research into the operation of the regime in practice, we outline how local state actors have become increasingly knowledgeable about their role in the regime and have become indispensable players in the implementation of these projects, including in relation to their own formal powers and roles in the system but also through a range of informal practices drawing on local knowledge and community relationships. In performing these roles, we argue that local authorities are engaging in statecraft through scalecraft. This scalecraft means that the local state is more important to the functioning of a central state regime than has previously been acknowledged, resulting in a complex and fragmented central-local state scalar layering. In turn, this demonstrates that despite the challenges of austerity, local authorities continue to draw on their own democratic legitimacy to perform vital state functions.