Rescaling regions in the state: The New Regionalism in California

A “new civic regionalism” – based on participatory, inclusive and partnership models of governance – has recently been rolled out in California to tackle the challenges of urban growth, planning and economic development across the State's diverse metropolitan and rural regions. Backed by non-profits and private foundations, California's New Regionalism has been packaged as a flexible and responsive grassroots governance initiative, which is designed to circumnavigate State and local government. Its proponents have been influenced by New Regionalist ideas and practices circulating nationally and internationally. Despite this, our explanation for the rise of the New Regionalism in California is not grounded in these wider theoretical and policy developments; nor do we see it as the outcome of a “new politics of scale” framed around the region. Instead, California's newest regionalism is part of a much longer-standing social movement spearheaded by large-scale business interests and directed at reorganizing local and State government powers particularly in urban regions. This regional reform movement has sought to rationalize land use and environmental planning, coordinate infrastructure, and make government more fiscally efficient and responsive to growth. Over the longer term, its efforts have been undermined by the fiscal fallout of the property tax revolt, Proposition 13. Our analysis calls into question some of the claims in the literature on state rescaling and suggests the value of collapsing the conceptual distinction made between new spaces of political regionalism and regional economic spaces.

There has been a marked resurgence of interest in regions in the international social sciences and certain policy literatures. This is partly about changes in the economy but also has to do with changes in territorial governance and the geography of the state. The resurgence itself has been described as the New Regionalism (Keating, 1997, Lovering, 1999), though this term in fact covers a disparate body of academic work and policy discourse, written for different academic audiences and policy

Regionalism, both in California and in the planning history of the U.S. is a long-lived concept, reinvented over time as an approach to solve new and persistent problems of the management of regions. An important structural context for these problems is the deeply embedded subsidiarity that characterizes American government and, with this, the decentralization of land use decision making, fiscal structures, and electoral politics (De Tocqueville, 1963, Jonas, 2002, Monkkonen, 1995). Formally,

In Table 1, we summarize a chronology of regionalist initiatives across the State of California throughout the 20th century and continuing into the new Millennium. The point we wish to make about this chronology is that regionalism in California is best seen as a long-term social movement – often punctuated by moments of intense political activity (lobbying, voter initiatives, etc.) at local and State levels – rather than a short-term response to wider pressures of globalization or policy

The seeds for a New Regionalism in California were thus already sown by the Wilson administration. Wilson's growth management plan put a number of initiatives in place that set the stage for the voluntary, regional bottom-up approaches now being rolled out. A number of these came out of the new environmentalism, notably problems of urban growth versus habitat protection that faced California due to its high biodiversity and numbers of endangered species in or approximate to areas under

The purpose of this paper has been to examine concretely an example of the New Regionalism in light of growing interest in the political and economic resurgence of regions. It has considered the value of a state-rescaling perspective on understanding how ostensibly new spaces of regionalism have appeared in the landscape of one of the largest, most globalized (however this is defined), and economically important States in the United States, California. We have cautioned against a predisposition

The authors express their gratitude to Nick Bollman for his insights into California's New Regionalism and for comments on a draft of this paper. John Agnew, Mary Nichols, Max Neiman, and Jody Freeman also provided helpful suggestions, as did the reviewers. John Garner prepared the figures. Andy Jonas would like to thank the National Science Foundation (SBR-9512033) for initial funding to study urban growth, regional governance and planning in Southern California, and we both thank Jim Sullivan