Modernisation without ‘banalisation’: Towards a new era in French African aid relations?

This article considers recent changes in France's assistance programme to black Africa. It looks at the historic logic underpinning France's aid policies and structures; examines the latest reforms; and attributes these to the election of a reformist socialist government, a favourable political climate, globalisation and the constraints of EMU. The main obstacle to reform is said to be President Chirac who remains attached to the old logic of French African relations. Ultimately, however, it is not the struggle between modernisers and traditionalists but pressures from France's African and European partners which will determine the future of French aid policy.     

From May to October: Reassessing the 1968 Generation

Since the early 1980s, France has transformed its pattern of economic policy‐making from a state‐led or dirigiste approach to a more market‐oriented one and generated a new set of dynamics between French business and government at regional, national, and European levels. Business has become more independent of the central state as a result of deregulation, privatisation, regional integration, and Europeanisation, more interdependent as a result of cross‐shareholdings, and more international in consequence of cross‐border mergers and acquisitions. State interventionism, where it remains, has become more circumscribed and less directive, targeting firms only in strategic areas or in trouble.     

From ‘Generation Auclert’ to ‘Generation Ockrent’: Convictions,Comparisons and Continuities

Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential campaign culminated with an appeal to ‘liquidate’ the heritage of the revolt of May 1968. Through an examination of the trajectories of all candidates at the 2007 election, this article seeks to explain the controversy around Sarkozy's remarks in terms of the broader impact of the ‘’68 years’ on a generation of both right and left born in the postwar period.     

Values in a vacuum? Towards an integrated multi‐level analysis of the governance of European space

This article calls for a new analytical approach to address how the emergence of a new European spatial policy field conditions policy‐making and implementation across Europe. This is now urgent because as the new policy field takes shape, its core ideas and values are being contested across different scales, sectors and territories of governance, creating new debates and arenas where understandings of space, place and connectivity, and relations between environment, society and economy, are being recast in a European light. In the full flow of generating a new policy field, we still seem to know little about what is being put at stake, or specifically how this is occurring. A value‐driven critical response from the research community is therefore needed, informed by research activity reaching across many dimensions of governance and policy‐making. The point of developing such an approach is not to discount previous research, but to explore how to generate synthetic and critical insights from different disciplinary and conceptual approaches within an integrated analytical framework. After this discussion, we conclude by proposing that IMAGES (Integrated Multi‐level Analysis of the Governance of European Space) can provide such a framework for analysing the emerging policy field of European spatial polices by constructing narratives of how spatial policy ideas and concepts turn into programming space, and how different territories interrelate with these policy concepts, and at the same time contribute to shaping them. This viewpoint and framework are predicated on the authors' belief that values behind the concepts remain hidden at present, both in policy processes and related research. Spatial policies seem to happen in a vacuum of values. By putting spatial justice as a value into this vacuum and by exploring the multi‐level governance of European space within an integrative analytical framework, the further development and application of the IMAGES framework can fulfil the need to contest the idea of objective policy‐making and analysis in European spatial policy.     

Towards a Regional Renaissance? Reconfiguring and Rescaling England's Economic Governance

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous academic and political appeal to the regional scale as the key with which to rear economic and social revitalization. Learning from exemplars such as Baden Württemberg, certain proponents of a purported 'new regionalism' advocate that the economic and democratic deficit in less-favoured regions may be revitalized by fostering a series of interacting social, economic and institutional networks. This paper provides a discussion of some of the more sophisticated approaches heralding a regional renaissance. These are then deployed through a case study of the restructuring and rescaling of England's economic governance in the late 1990s via the establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Focusing on the experience of the North-West region, their analysis reveals that, whilst useful as a form of contextualizing regional transformation and governance, the new regionalist approaches are unable to provide a rigorous framework through which to consider England's own peculiar regional 'resurgence'. In turn, the authors call for a serious consideration of the state as a critical animateur in both structuring and scaling economic and civic life. The paper concludes that in future research, a lack of sensitivity to situated path-dependent regional economic and political geographies may serve to reproduce the 'fantasies' inherent in some earlier (post-Fordist)'transition models'.