Towards a sustainable, negotiated mode of strategic regional planning: a political economy perspective

The need to give strategic direction to complex regional systems has never been greater, but reinstating a classic strategic plan model that failed to secure consistently positive impacts, or even sustain its own practice, is a mistaken route. With a mix of conceptual analysis, critical review of past experience and examination of population dynamics across England’s Wider South East and its fringes, this paper argues for a decentred form of strategic governance based on the development of a capacity for negotiated collaboration and realistic engagement with powerful market and institutional processes on a sustained basis.