I can't speak to the details of the British case. Here in Cape Breton,
Canada the notion of a development zone makes an enormous amount of sense.
In fact, the availability of a development agency with some funds and some
discretion specific to the region is one of the major resources available
to the region to help overcome some of the de-development that has been
going on here for the last 50 years or so.
I tend to agree about the need for local accountability over these
resources. In a context of overall resource scarcity, access to resources
in a small region (zone) becomes enormously tempting to a variety of
actors and tends to be used to pursue political rather than (?)
development agendas.
The danger of course, of development zones, is that they tend to prop up
or perpetuate a local lack of competitiveness (lets not talk about the
overall structure of the "market" economy at this point) which, when the
props are removed as they inevitably will be, leads to local economic
disasters.. Live by politician's largesse and die by politician's
fickleness.
What a "zonal" approach can do (at least in theory) is allow for an
integrated strategy to optimize the development of local resources or
local "clusters" or local activity hubs which when the props are pulled
may, just may, have some chance of surviving on their own. Without an
approach like that regions like Cape Breton with its 200,000 or so
population (reducing at 1% a year) don't figure on anybody's political,
economic or programmatic agenda.
Additionally, a good part of the problem for Cape Breton and I suspect for
a lot of other left-behind regions is its "dependency" relation as a
"periphery" to an expanding, self-confident, power centre
political/economic/administrative hub (in our case the designated "growth
pole", Halifax). Initially as an act of policy, all development was
concentrated in Halifax the "growth pole", with the notion, I guess, of
"trickle down" (although the likelihood of even a "trickle" over some 300
miles and a major historic/cultural/religious/geographic divide should
have seemed even to regional development economists of the orthodox
persuasion rather unlikely).
What the "zone" approach does (could do) is to wrest from the incredibly
centrifugal grasp of the "growth pole" a degree of
activity/resources/attention to focus on development within the zone
rather than the pipe dreams of "spin-off developments" propounded by
swivel chaired economists.
I won't say that it works, but there is at least some chance of it working
and the alternative strategy doesn't, from here, work at all.
Mike Gurstein
Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
ECBC/NSERC/SSHRC Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change
Director: Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN)
University College of Cape Breton, POBox 5300, Sydney, NS, CANADA B1P 6L2
Tel. 902-539-4060 (o) 902-562-1055 (h) 902-562-0119 (fax)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ccen.uccb.ns.ca
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 11:40:06 +0100 (BST)
From: D S Byrne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Michael Gurstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Canadian futures <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
Employment zones are a local pilot application of the Blairite programme
of welfare to work, modelled on the US precedent. They seek to achieve
full employment but without assigning any power to workers which might
result from that. Full employment is very contradictory for capitalism. On
the one hand it is an enormous social regulator. It legitimizes the system
and also avoids the problem of the devil finding deviant acts for idle
hands to undertake. On the other, given an effective trade union movement,
it empowers workers at the point of production. Welfare to work in the
contemporary UK with a trade union movement weaker than it has been since
the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1829 is all about social control and
not at all about empowerment. To the extent that it does improve workers
wages, by tax credit schemes, it does so by a horizontal transfer within
the working class from real middle income earners who have had limited
real gains from the growth of the last twenty years, and does not touch
the incomes of the top 10% who have collared the bulk of that growth for
themselves, indeed it is probably the top 5% - capitalists and their
lackeys like Blair.
By the way we have a long experience now of 'zone' strategies in the UK.
The one common element is that the people who live in them have bugger all
power in determining what is to be done. It is done to them, not by them.
As for that hero of the working class (which he left long ago) Prescott, I
will reproduce here my grandfather's (a real seaman) doubtless
prejuidiced views on ships stewards, that berk's former profession - he
regarded them as dirty in their persons and their habits and liable to
steal from their messmates. Not much changes does it ?
David Byrne
Dept of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Durham
Elvet Riverside
New Elvet
Durham DH1 3JT
0191-374-2319
0191-0374-4743 fax
>
>
>
