How to deal with migrants and the State’s backlash – Polish cities’ experience

Over the last decades, Poland has witnessed a relatively dynamic increase in the number of immigrants. At the same time, current Polish central authorities, politicians of the ruling party and the majority of the population perceive migrants mostly as a threat and a challenge. Municipal authorities lack complex support from central authorities. However, the situation is slowly changing. Some Polish cities are adopting migration policies or including migration issues in the local development strategies. Considering this, the article aims to examine migrants’ integration policies in selected Polish cites considered leaders in this field: Lublin, Gdańsk, Kraków and Wroc?aw. The main research question is: how do Polish cities deal with the backlash from the national government and absence of clear legal regulations on their role and competences in the area of migrant integration? The research method is that of a legal-institutional analysis and case study. The former is used to interpret the legal acts and other documents. Its application is justified by the fact that this paper examines strategic documents adopted at the level of urban governments regarding the integration of migrants. Case study methods made it possible to examine the migrants’ integration policy in four Polish cities.     

Tailored polities in the shadow of the state’s hierarchy. The CLLD implementation and a future research agenda

The paper provides a theoretical contribution to the multi-level governance debate, discussing the role of the policy instruments in tailoring polities for local development strategies. To this purpose, it examines the Community-Led Local Development (CLLD), a policy tool of the EU Cohesion Policy 2014–2020, which has generated more than 3000 local initiatives across the EU. An institutionalist perspective enables a reflection on the multi-level normative dimensions of these local initiatives. A combination of the post-functionalist governance theory, the soft space debate, state-theory and strategic-relational approach provides an interpretative framework to be deployed for a dedicated research agenda. The interpretative challenge is about whether the CLLD enables spatial-temporal fixes in which a deliberative polity pursues a spatial imaginary for an ad-hoc territory. The consequent analytical dimensions can be found in (a) the relationship between attendant ad-hoc polity, policy agenda, territorial design and societal processes; and (b) the meta-governance dimensions that locate the bottom-up constituency of this institutional technology in the shadow of state’s hierarchy. An overview of the CLLD implementation across the EU provides evidence on the latter.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.     

Wishful thinking? Towards a more realistic role for universities in regional innovation policy

ABSTRACT

The past 30 years has seen an escalating interest in the potential role of universities in contributing to their regional economies, reflected in the increasing trend for regional innovation strategies to ascribe a central role for universities, particularly in peripheral, institutionally thin places. The global economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures implemented in many developed economies have put further pressure on universities from national and regional policymakers to become more explicitly involved in contributing to their local economies in order to justify their public funding. This paper will draw on the academic literature to consider how justified this focus is by questioning whether universities are willing or even able to play the roles expected of them in contributing to regional innovation. It will critique an approach to policymaking that often views universities as homogenous actors in the regional innovation system and places an over reliance on imitating success stories from other places without sufficient consideration of the specificities of local conditions. It will argue for a more realistic and nuanced approach to involving universities in regional innovation policy, concluding with key insights for both universities and policymakers.     

What drives export performance of firms in Eastern and Western Poland?

We use a unique firm-level survey dataset that draws from the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) questionnaire to unveil differences in factors driving export performance in the most structurally diverse areas of Poland. While conventional results regarding the role of size, foreign ownership and innovation activity are confirmed at the aggregate level, the picture breaks down when Western and Eastern macroregions are extracted. Our results suggest that the common perception of a more developed West (Poland ‘A’) and a backward East (Poland ‘B’) might be outdated. Rather, firms in both regions seem to follow distinct strategies for and have dissimilar success factors in competing internationally. Interestingly, export performance in the East is found to benefit from family ties in business, but also from product innovation and non-price competitiveness. In the West, it is associated mostly with size and foreign ownership. Overall, our results, on the one hand, add support to the ‘new’ new trade theory and the ‘new’ new economic geography’s premises related to the importance of microeconomic factors and, on the other, contribute to the discussion on the pattern of regional development in Poland. We also discuss some implications for policymakers and managers and suggest directions for further research.     

Paving the way for new regional industrial paths: actors and modes of change in Scania’s games industry

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly work has enhanced our understanding of how new path development activities are enabled or constrained by ‘regional environments’, made up of pre-existing industrial structures, knowledge organizations, support structures and institutional configurations. This paper moves beyond overly static views on regional environments. We develop a dynamic perspective by analysing conceptually and empirically how a constraining environment can be transformed into one that enables the development of new growth paths. The paper offers a typology of various modes of change, including layering, adaptation and novel application that are used by key actors to ‘manipulate’ the regional support structures to facilitate new regional industrial path development. The conceptual framework is applied to a case study of the digital games industry in the region of Scania, southern Sweden. Our findings suggest that the creation of a more enabling environment for the growth of the digital games industry has been the outcome of multi-scalar processes and combinations of various modes of change employed by a few key individuals operating in the newly emerging path.