Jonathan S Davies

De Montfort University | DMU · Department of Politics and Public Policy

Between Realism and Revolt explores urban governance in the “age of austerity”, focusing on the period between the global economic crisis of 2008-9 and the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic at the end of 2019. It considers urban governance from the perspective of governability. How did cities navigate the crisis and its aftermath of austeri...

Austerity has been delivered in the UK without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between urban regime theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the article considers how austerity was normalized and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring, and austerity,...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global event, but what became apparent almost immediately was that while the virus seems indiscriminate, vulnerability and the capacity to mitigate its impact are not spread equally, either between or within countries. Years of austere neoliberalism in Europe have exacerbated inequality and precarity, acting as a 'pre-exi...

Theories heralding the rise of network governance have dominated for a generation. Yet, empirical research suggests that claims for the transformative potential of networks are exaggerated. This topical and timely book takes a critical look at contemporary governance theory, elaborating a Gramscian alternative. It argues that, although the ideology...

The concept of “resilience” is ubiquitous in global governance, extending from climate and ecological issues to practically all spheres of human endeavor. However, post‐pandemic discourses suggest that the concept may no longer be capable of synthesizing diverse and diverging geopolitical interests into common policy goals. Responding to what we se...

Research on local government in the UK during the era of austerity has shown that the decisions taken by local councils to cope with financial stresses were often narrated through the discourse of ‘resilience’, referencing their capacity to innovate and transform services, while protecting service provision in core areas. This emphasis on ‘resilien...

The concept of “resilience” is ubiquitous in global governance, extending from climate and ecological issues to practically all spheres of human endeavor. However, post-pandemic discourses suggest that the concept may no longer be capable of synthesizing diverse and diverging geopolitical interests into common policy goals. Responding to what we se...

The British university system is in a deep crisis, born of a two-pronged assault. The crisis is born firstly from decades of neoliberal marketisation and the rise of a remote and authoritarian executive elite presiding over a downwardly mobile and culturally deprivileged academic profession. We call this process neoliberal managerialism. It is born...

In dialogue with Della Porta’s work on protests as critical junctures and drawing on the comparative analysis of four case studies in Europe (Barcelona and Dublin) and North America (Baltimore and Montréal), the paper develops a neo-Gramscian perspective on the impact and legacies of urban resistance to austere neoliberalism after the Global Econom...

Drawing from neo-Gramscian theory, the paper explores how urban austerity governance mediates crises of neoliberal hegemony. Focusing on the decade after the Global Economic Crisis of 2008–2009, it compares four European cities disclosing five intersecting characteristics of urban political economy that contributed to sustaining and disrupting aust...

New municipalism in Spain arose from a major political wave, now in a period of crisis and electoral retreat. This paper applies a regime-theoretic framework to analyse new municipalist governance in two smaller city cases: A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela. It argues that whilst new municipalist electoral victories inaugurated a crisis for estab...

Chapter 1 focuses on how the eight cities encountered, worked with and against austerity in the period after the GEC. It begins by providing a flavour of the histories and traditions which contribute to explaining how austerity was experienced and mediated. It then turns to a discussion of Athens, Baltimore, Dublin, Leicester and Montréal, where mo...

The research shows that in some ways, the age of austerity vindicated critiques of “collaborative governance” as a medium of governmental control or “responsibilisation”. State-driven collaboration in the face of harsh austerity proved to be gestural, shallow and transient or reinforced the power of elites. However, in the wider sense of “who does...

This chapter discusses the way that (neoliberal) austerity has impacted social, racial and cultural inequalities and the ability of collaboration to support more inclusive democratic cities or resist exclusions. The basic premise is that cities play a fundamental role in the dynamics of social inclusion or exclusion of economic migrants and other r...

This chapter critically assesses the forms of social and political resistance that emerged across the eight cities in our study. Building on themes introduced in chapters 1 and 2, it argues that cities serve as crucibles for a diverse set of political contestations, responses and initiatives, but they exhibit differential capacities to shape their...

The 2008-2009 Global Economic Crisis (GEC) created an opportunity, eagerly seized by many national governments and international organisations, to impose a prolonged, and widespread period of austerity. Austerity is widely recognised to have done enormous damage to social, cultural, political and economic infrastructures in cities and larger urban...

This chapter seeks to better understand how austerity governance has been experienced in the eight cities, from the perspective of the local state. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, we consider literature on the local state and governance to frame contemporary changes in structure and function. Second, returning to the economic crisis...

From the basis of multiple definitions and mixed practices of collaborative governance, this chapter explores trends found through the comparative study of our eight cities, in the decade after the GEC. We aim to examine the impact of austerity on localised collaborative structures of policymaking. Specifically, the chapter elaborates three dimensi...

Our research concluded some time before the outbreak of COVID-19, but we suggest that many of the insights drawn from it, about austerity and collaboration, will be useful in considering ways forward from the pandemic. In the first instance, it seems clear that austerity made COVID-19 an iniquitous disease, with cities and urban peripheries the hea...

In this chapter, we show how the study of scale is enlightening when trying to understand how austerity has functioned in our eight case study cities. In order to put forth a clear definition of how we use the concept, we also propose a definition of scale and promote a synthetic and multi-faceted definition such as the one suggested by Byron Mille...

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

This topical book takes a critical look at contemporary governance theory, arguing that there are structural impediments to achieving an ideology of networks and reconsidering it from Marxist and Gramscian perspectives.

Introduction This chapter takes a detour from the core subject matter of governance theory. It argues that to understand why authentic network governance does not seem to be emerging we need first to challenge underlying assumptions encapsulated in the idea that we are moving from the logic of structures to the logic of flows. The chapter argues th...

This topical book takes a critical look at contemporary governance theory, arguing that there are structural impediments to achieving an ideology of networks and reconsidering it from Marxist and Gramscian perspectives.

Introduction This chapter begins by briefly exploring the relationship between academic theory and public policy. It then explains how network governance became the orthodoxy in global public policy. It thirdly explores a paradigm case, the UK, and the socioeconomic conditions and ideas that made building governance networks a cardinal governing pr...

The wider context for the Marxist-Gramscian perspective developed in this book is what Callinicos (2007b, p 345) sees as the changing of the subject away from postmodernism back towards capitalism, class and resistance – themes that the transformation thesis dismissed amid the crisis of Marxism, the global capitalist renaissance and its fetish for...

Introduction As was suggested in Chapter Five, a key challenge for research influenced by Marxism is to move between the domains of theory, empirical inquiry and struggle. The first part of this chapter develops a research framework drawing on the tradition of ‘dialectical network analysis’ (Benson, 1977; Marsh and Smith, 2000). The chapter then ex...

Introduction To recap, Chapter Three argued that actual-existing governance networks appear dysfunctional from the standpoint of post-traditional governance theory, tending to replicate practices they were meant to surpass. Chapter Four argued that the basis for explaining this puzzle is that the social, political and economic conditions for widesp...

Introduction Chapter One begins by exploring core ideas in network governance theory understood as the ‘orthodoxy’. It then discusses the variety of approaches that espouse post-traditional ideas about changing forms of governance. The second part of the chapter explores the intellectual roots of post-traditional thinking through the lens of the th...

Introduction Chapter Two suggested that there is little direct empirical evidence pointing to the emergence of authentic connectionist practices. On the contrary, much of the literature highlights barriers to this outcome. This chapter explores key themes in the critical literatures, highlighting the empirical basis for a critique of network govern...

Introduction Economic migration flows, accelerated by globalization, have substantially increased the cultural and ethnic diversity of Western societies with high GDP economies. As a large part of these migration flows are motivated by the aspirations of those living in the Global South, or the majority world, to improve their living conditions in...

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

Our research concluded some time before the outbreak of COVID-19, but we suggest that many of the insights drawn from it, about austerity and collaboration, will be useful in considering ways forward from the pandemic. In the first instance, it seems clear that austerity made COVID-19 an even more iniquitous disease than it would in any case have b...

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

Our book details and documents the impact of austerity governance on a selection of cities. Yet for some commentators, cities and urban spaces remain the ‘new theatres of struggle’ in our contemporary condition (Hamel, 2014). This chapter critically assesses the forms of social and political resistance that emerged across the eight cities in our st...

Introduction As the introductory chapter explained, collaboration was popularized as an idea across much of the globe in the 1990s and 2000s, including the Global South, and was considerably influenced by international actors and donor non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as ideas circulating through nation states about modernizing public...

Chapter 1 focuses on how the eight cities encountered, worked with and against austerity in the period after the GEC. It begins by providing a flavour of the histories and traditions which contribute to explaining how austerity was experienced and mediated. It then turns to a discussion of Athens, Baltimore, Dublin, Leicester and Montréal, where mo...

Introduction The reality of austerity in our eight case study cities and elsewhere has been strongly shaped by a phenomenon, long studied by geographers and recognized across the social sciences as well as by practitioners in policy making, politics and activism: social, political and institutional spaces are structured through a hierarchy of spati...

This chapter seeks to better understand how austerity governance has been experienced in the eight cities, from the perspective of the local state. As earlier chapters demonstrate, austerity governance is a real challenge for cities and local states, which can often have competing priorities and imperatives. This is because traditionally, local man...

A central message emerging from the volume is that while austerity may sometimes be instrumentally rational for profit-seeking corporations and governments wanting to position their countries as low-regulation, low-cost capital havens, it is always a political choice and never a necessity. It is invariably a disaster from the standpoint of equality...

Leading governance theorist Jonathan S. Davies develops a rich comparative analysis of austerity governance and resistance in eight cities, to establish a conjunctural perspective on the rolling crises of neoliberal globalism.

This research explores institutional arrangements that govern health literacy promotion policies in Thailand since 2014. This study sets the main questions as what are the main institutional arrangements that governed health literacy promotion policies in Thailand since 2014 and can these arrangements be viewed as collaborative health governance? T...

Between Realism and Revolt explores urban governance in the “age of austerity”, focusing on the period between the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the beginning of the global Coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019. It considers urban governance after the 2008 crisis, from the perspective of governability. How did cities navigate the crisis a...

This chapter considers the problem of containment, de-mobilisation and fragmentation, dimensions of urban governance that mitigate against both antagonistic and constructive modes of resistance. This endeavour casts light on a number of issues: first, the means by which urban regimes contain and enclose resistance, and insulate themselves from pote...

The chapter reflects on the question of governability, from the standpoint of the mooted interregnum in the hegemony of neoliberal globalism. It first recapitulates the positioning of each city in relation to austere neoliberalism and the urban political (dis)orderings disclosed by the research. The remainder of the chapter discusses five political...

Chapters 4 and 5 turn from state rescaling to coalitions among state, market and civil society actors, and the urban regime configurations that have arisen, or been challenged, in the post-crisis period. Chapter 4 explores the four cities in which regime consolidation was occurring around the amplification of austere neoliberalism: Athens, Baltimor...

The book concludes that in the period preceding COVID-19, five cross-cutting characteristics were prominent in shaping urban political (dis)orders: economic rationalism, weakening hegemony, the retreat to dominance, weak counter-hegemony and acute politicisations. Economic rationalism, administrative dominance and weak counter-hegemony tended to re...

Theodore (2020: 2) argues that since the global financial crisis, “austerity has become the primary means for the further neoliberalisation of inherited arrangements”: neoliberalisation upon earlier waves of neoliberalism. Chapter 2 delves into this proposition. It begins by exploring the impact of the GFC, and its aftermath, in the eight countries...

Chapter 6 explores resistance from the perspective of its capacity to deplete the governability of austere neoliberalism, construct solidarities, incubate alternative political economies in local state and civil society, and channel particularistic grievances into a more generalised anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist politics. It highlights three w...

Chapter 1 develops the framework through which urban political (dis)orders are explored in subsequent chapters. It begins by engaging debates about critical vantage-point. It advances a Gramscian approach to urban regime analysis, through which it pivots between perspectives, and explores the encounter between power and resistance in struggles over...

The story of austerity is entwined with experiments in city-regionalism, authoritarianism, fiscal and political centralisation and downloading or scalar dumping. Interpenetrating institutional, territorial and scalar restructurings have significant implications for politics and governing cultures, and relations between local states and citizens. Th...

The cities of Montréal, Nantes, Dandenong and Barcelona diverge in several ways from patterns of consolidation in austere neoliberalism discussed in chapter 4. These four cities all encounter familiar challenges with economic restructuring, and all have been exposed to waves of ideology, policy and state restructuring associated with austere neolib...

Leading governance theorist Jonathan S. Davies develops a rich comparative analysis of austerity governance and resistance in eight cities, to establish a conjunctural perspective on the rolling crises of neoliberal globalism.

This report, for non-academic users, summarises the interim conclusions from our ESRC study of austerity governance in eight cities. It also provides an overview of the eight case study cities: Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal and Nantes.

The meaning of ‘urban crisis’, and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban ‘crisis-talk’ tends to over-exten...

The meaning of ‘urban crisis’, and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban ‘crisistalk’ tends to over-extend...

This paper explores neoliberalisation and its counter-currents through a six-case study of austerity urbanism in Spain and the UK. Applying Urban Regime Theory it highlights the role of urban politics in driving, variegating and containing neoliberalism since the 2008 crash. Variegated austerity regimes contribute to strengthening neoliberalism, bu...

This article questions the widely held notions of Russian exceptionalism as regards its state–society relations, arguing that the conceptual tools used to study governance in other regions and contexts are applicable in Russia, opening the potential for fruitful comparisons and dialogue. Our analytical framework for studying Russian governance emph...

Since the 1980s, the word "governance" has become widespread. This book draws on decentred theory to offer a more varied account of the changing nature of public action and public organisation.

This entry explores the development of urban regime theory during the 1980s in response to economic determinism and structuralist readings of city government. It explains the regime-theoretical focus on the need for businesses and city governments to cooperate in order to deliver their respective agendas, and the agency required for them to collabo...

“Does politics matter” is an enduring question in urban studies. This paper contributes to the debate by exploring the agency of city leaders in local economic development policy in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Leeds (UK). In place of the conventional (and valid) focus on structural constraint under neoliberalism, we show how decisions by leader...

Theories heralding new ways of governing through networks became prominent in the 1990s and 2000, but declined in influence after the crisis of 2008 and the rollout of austerity. This study of austerity governance in Leicester explores the influence of post-traditional network and modernist theories. In Leicester’s austerian realism it finds multip...

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observatio...

Urban theory has largely overlooked the continuing centrality of coercion in the governance of cities. The paper argues that urban research should take everyday coercion far more seriously in the next decade than it did in the previous two. It highlights seven key research questions: what kinds of coercive power do cities have at their disposal? In...

Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian approaches enjoy considerable influence in research on the mutations of neoliberal governance in cities. However, both are prone to treating coercion as the antithesis of power, leading them to downplay the coercive modalities of neoliberalism. This paper applies the Gramscian theory of the integral state to correct th...

This paper reports two phases of research undertaken in the City of Leicester during Autumn 2013 and Spring 2014. It explores how the institutions and practices of collaborative governance evolve in austerity conditions. The case study is part of the TRANSGOB project funded by the Spanish government, exploring seven cases: Cardiff and Leicester (UK...