Collaborative Regional Governance:Lessons from Greater Manchester

This paper describes how a primarily “bottom-up” form of metropolitan or city-regional governance in Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, developed over more than three decades. It begins with an assessment of three recent contributions to the literature on the development and governance of complex urban areas, each of which takes a different approach to explaining the place of metropolitan governance in shaping urban change. Their authors’ concerns with the broader economic and policy climate in which reforms of governance take shape, the importance of constitutional arrangements and practices for institutional change, and the role of leadership guide this account of change in Greater Manchester. It identifies five characteristics of the governance regime that have been critical to sustaining its momentum: its primarily economic orientation; the practice of proceeding at the pace of the fastest, not the slowest; pragmatism in developing intergovernmental and public-private coalitions for change; the commitment to evidence-based policy; and continuity in political and executive leadership. In the end, each of the accounts with which the paper started proves useful, but partial, in explaining change in Greater Manchester. Generic considerations abstracted from the Greater Manchester experience concern the importance of choosing the “right” geography of governance, but being prepared to be flexible about it; working consistently on a narrative that binds different stakeholders together; proceeding through coalitions of the willing rather than grand abstract designs; and developing leaders able to give coalitions a clear sense of direction.