The annual conference of the Regional Studies Association (RSA) Irish Branch was organised at NUI Maynooth last Monday. Conference speakers included representatives of the OECD, IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, Forfás and Shannon Development, the ESRI, Teagasc and Irish Universities.
The conference aimed to enhance our understanding of, and stimulate debate about, the role of the regions in Ireland’s smart economy. In Ireland, a key policy response to the current economic crisis has been the Smart Economy action plan. This sets out a vision of structural reform – one that envisages the Irish economy focusing on export-led growth, innovation, R&D and high skilled jobs. However, little attention has been given to the regional aspects of this strategy and the effects on balanced regional development. Prior, during and after the conference, the RSA has received several valuable submissions. I hope you can restate these by way of commenting on this post so that they can serve to stimulate further discussion.
As a background I summarize some of the contributions below.
- According to the two top-level OECD officials speaking at the event, regional areas internationally are very important contributors to national aggregate economic growth, in particular intermediate regions hosting medium size cities.
- The OECD emphasised that magical ‘one size fits all’ solutions do not exist. Good infrastructure, investment in human capital and promoting innovation are all key elements. To achieve this, Ireland should ensure that it efficiently links all levels of Government.
- Other speakers argued that local Government structures in Ireland need to be overhauled, and that the Government should now revisit the National Spatial Strategy.
Two speakers from the OECD addressed the conference. Jose Enrique Garcilazo, Head of Unit in the OECD, emphasised that regions can play a very important role in driving national economic growth, in particular intermediate regions hosting medium size cities. In fact, he argued, they are roughly as important as the contribution from the most developed regions.
According to Joaquim Oliveira Martins, Head of the Regional Development Division at the OECD, there is no magical ‘one size fits all’ formula that can be applied to all regions for promoting growth. He said that the OECD finds that the most important growth drivers are infrastructure, human capital, innovation and agglomeration. Given the range of inputs needed, Ireland should ensure that all levels of Government work effectively together in order to build a sound and sustainable regional economy.
According to the OECD, in order to build a sound and sustainable regional economy, Ireland should design regional polices that combine bottom-up with top-down approaches designed to unlock the regional potential of all Irish regions whereas past growth has been rather unevenly distributed. This requires close collaboration among actors across all levels of government, as well as the private sector and civil society. The policy design should be in line with the new paradigm shift observed in many OECD countries from redistributive subsidies to investment in regional competitive advantages and from a narrowly sectoral approach to integrated cross-sectoral projects.
Echoing the OECD emphasis on the role of Governance, Vincent Cunnane, CEO of Shannon Development called for more collaboration at regional level to drive Ireland’s economic recovery: “Current structures need to be overhauled to make regions more effective sources of economic growth and more attractive locations for inward investment.” Another speaker, Professor Jim Walsh of NUI Maynooth, said that it is now time to redraw the National Spatial Strategy, as it is no longer appropriate for Ireland for the next 20 years.
Also speaking at the conference, John O’Brien of IDA Ireland said that the IDA had had successes in attracting foreign firms to invest in the regions, and that their medium term plan would continue with this aim. However he also said that there were very real challenges to attract some companies to invest outside of Dublin. He emphasised the importance of ensuring the firms which were already employers here to reinvest in Ireland.
Chris van Egeraat
Ireland after NAMA 
September 14, 2011 at 1:28 pm
There is still an obsession in Ireland with the mantra of “export led economic growth” whilst businesses are closing down and others failing to start up and other countries are all now feeling the pinch and exports are struggling to do much more than tread water. What about the idea of reducing imports as a way of improving our resilience and reducing our debt ? Ways of reducing imports would include a campaign for buying Irish and support for more local food and timber initiatives. Agroforestry initiatives (combining food and timber in carefully designed systems rather than separate fields and plantations) would be particularly appropriate throughout Ireland and tick the additional boxes of biodiversity enhancement, carbon sequestration, flood attenuation, soil stabilisation, improved soil fertility and enhanced landscape character. This is proven in other countries, including UK and is surely worth a substatial investment now ? I would be most interested to hear answers.
Yours sincerely,
Bob Wilson
September 14, 2011 at 2:55 pm
For years various analyses,including a number by NESC, have highlighted the need to consider regional dimensions to growth and concepts such as clusters and networks. Despite recognising the importance of these ideas they have not taken hold in Ireland. The difficulty has been to find support for these ideas. In part resistance may have reflected some uncertainty at central level about the demands of regional policy; and, in part a lack of support at local level where ideas such as competition seemed to hold sway.
The conference suggests that faced as we are with the challenge of deepening our export capacity (and our ability to compete with imports) regional growth, networks or local coalitions may be key. In a sense, these are ideas whose time may have come.
The position advocated by the OECD was for a focus on what regions could contribute to growth: a focus on local assets, capabilities and networks. This view resonated with accounts from practitioners about networks emerging at local level such as the South East Business Network.
The challenge then is to work out, like the OECD are trying to do in Chicago and Shannon Development are doing in Ireland, what is most effective form of governance for a given region. The various presentations suggest that as we continue to work our way of the crisis there is a lot to be gained by more thoughtful analysis of growth within the regions and how capacities in specific areas can be most effectively mobilised.
September 14, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Enjoyed the conference. I agree that we need to reorganise regional/local government structures etc. However, I do worry when ESRI, OECD,Teagsc, politicians and academia are in almost unanimous agreement. I think the capacity for ‘groupthink’ is all too evident. Personally I dont believe there is anything smart about growth [gdp/gnp/gva]! I think we should start by asking where we are [smart] growing to and if economic growth [smart or dumb] is actually possible in an era of energy descent. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the IEA, is on record that peak global oil production peaked in 2006 and just to stay where we are (no growth) we need to find ‘four new Saudia Arabias’. In these circumstances how a trade-based export-led economy based on an increasing focus on services is in fact smart! Ireland will have to become significantly smarter and very quickly to overcome our 99% dependence on imported fossil fuels! I think economists are prone to severely misunderstanding the physics (science) of economic growth – which ain’t smart at all! Each unit of economic growth requires more energy – you can only decouple relatively not absolutely.
There is a conference on next week to discuss these ‘dissident’ views which the attendees at the RSA conference might also be interested in attending.
http://www.feasta.org/2011/09/06/national-strategies-for-dealing-with-ireland%e2%80%99s-debt-crisis-exploring-the-options-september-22-23-2011/
Gavin Daly
September 15, 2011 at 12:03 pm
There is an old adage which says “if you don’t succeed try try again” when we change this around to “if at first you don’t suceed try something new”. seems to be the substance of the replies above. When I read about our experts who are advising that we bring water from the Shannon river to Dublin I said here we go again. Dublin and its hinterland is massively overdeveloped. An agreed strategy that developes a county town in each county or selected counties drawing residents inwards and away from Dublin would be favo urable.
What the recent past has or should teach us is that development left to County Managers and Councillors (eg. Gost estates and the like) has not worked and will not work.
The spatial strategy mentioned in replies is part of the way forward.
Brendan Byrne
September 15, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Nice to see people becoming engaged with the idea that decision-making placed nearest the citizen might be worth consideration….I must admit I allowed myself a small smile when it was suggested that an ideal model for sustaining economic vibrancy would be to create integrated policy development along the lines suggested by the OECD. The sad reality which has to be acknowledged is that the system of public management in Ireland has had such a system in place but has largely ignored it which is strange but sadly unsurprising as the system concerned…the “city/county development board” is one of a limited number of examples where Irish public administration has managed to provide a model of governance to the rest of the OECD. However it has not been the success it could have been due to the failure to develop integrated decision-making at natonal level and the political leadership required to underpin public service reform was largely missing over the past decade. Listening to both speakers from the OECD felt somewhat like being back to the future! This must be an area which usefully could be examined in more detail through the RSAIR
September 16, 2011 at 11:06 am
It strikes me that as a first step it is imperative to safeguard, strengthen and enhance the role of the existing eight Regional Authorities. The Regional Planning Guidelines, for all their flaws and limited implementation capacity represent an example of the ‘place-based’ approach to regional development advocated by the OECD (among many others, it should be noted).
The last ten years has provided all the lessons we could possibly need in relating regarding the necessity to strengthen national and regional level oversight in planning and development. In response the current government has shrunk the planning section of the Department of the Environment Community and Local Government to the extent that its role is limited to little more than fire-fighting and its capacity for strategic policy development and action is seriously undermined. In this context calls for a revised, presumably evidence informed NSS may be aspirational. Indeed it appears that the Department is delegating its oversight role in relation to monitoring the NSS and spatial development trends to the Regional Authorities.
At the same time, the very existence of the Regional Authorities in to the future continues to be questioned and placed on the table in the context of public sector reform.
In the current context, proposals for local and regional governance reform need to take cognisance of the need to safeguard, protect and enhance mechanisms for regional and national level oversight. If we don’t know where we are and more importantly if we don’t know what the neighbouring county or region is doing we cannot possibly know where we need to be going or how to strategically allocate resources.
September 20, 2011 at 3:52 pm
I must say I enjoyed the speakers and discussions on the day and agree with some of the comments above. I think the most telling point made by the OECD speakers was that about 44% of aggregate growth within OECD countries coming from ‘lagging regions’. I know some will (fairly) argue about what you use to measure growth but the major point is that regions which appear peripheral to economic development in a lot of countries have plenty to offer. The questions then come to focus on how to replicate the success stories to be found within these lagging regions and how to scale up those who are doing well.
Some of the commenters above have started to look at the possible institutional and governance answers to these questions – from strengthening the Regional Authorities to looking again at national policies. Others at the workshop focussed in on the data issue. All of these are important points and should form the basis of changing the conversation about regional policy from one of ‘why haven’t we got our own world class port/university/hospital/etc’ (along the distributive lines which Eoin O’Leary spoke well about) to ‘what our region is doing and can act as a model for or learn from other geographical areas’. In such a conversation an invitation to the OECD to do a territorial review of (the island of) Ireland might prove useful.
September 26, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Like many of the previous contributors I enjoyed the conference and the formal discussions and the informal chats over coffee. In terms of the contribution the conference made to ongoing discussions about the reform of local and regional governance arrangements, what struck me was the apolitical nature of many of the suggested remedies for Ireland. I am not sure I agree completely with the point made earlier about groupthink, though it has very significant merit, but as I saw it, no politicians or political parties engage in any meaningful way the issues debated on the day. This reflects a peculiarity about the Irish political establishment. Peter Mair suggested Irish political parties are either policy takers or policy makers. While there was a particular context for his contention I feel it retains its usefulness. Many of the speakers, particularly those working in public agencies, are involved in policy formulation. Most Irish politicians and political parties are not. They are policy takers. This is a critical matter when it comes to popular buy in for new ideas. In particular, ideas that have the potential or likelihood to disrupt the status quo. Political parties, including their linked think tanks, for all their perceived and real flaws, are important parts of the robust and appropriately embedded public policy formulation process. They provide a particular type of credibility to ideas in other countries. I don’t believe the issue in Ireland is that we are not interested in ideas but rather a certain combination of electoral rigidities, e.g multi-seat constituencies elected by PR-STV, weak political party HQs and policy development units/think tanks, the centralised nature of the executive power in Ireland, in conjunction with a very weak local/regional government system and a very significant amount of power delegated to officials rather than elected representatives mean that local and regional issues are depoliticised in a way that is very unusual.
A standard response to this analysis is to say that councillors and TDs don’t understand the issues and are beholding to vested interests. If my memory serves, this was stated in the plenary session, and the person was quite clear that elected representatives obviously didn’t grasp the complex technical issues involved in the person’s policy area. The problem with this view is the recipe to our current malaise always appears to be more of the same, more public service managerialism.
Maybe it is time to look at this differently. If we desire a functioning sub-national system of governance that is coherent, effective and has popular support and we want localities and regions to take responsibility for their areas, we shouldn’t just look at moving decision-making closer to the citizen we should also look at how the citizen and his/her representatives exercise power. This is not to suggest that public servants are currently circumventing elected representatives, but rather how do enable elected representatives to make meaningful decisions and be responsible and accountable to the public for those decisions. I suggest that it is only when representatives are accountable that we will see any meaningful developments in local and regional development.
October 9, 2011 at 12:30 pm
The point I am making regarding ‘groupthink’ is not that we should not be looking at better regional structures. What I have an issue with is the term ‘Smart Growth’ being used as both the policy objective and the measure of progress – this is a dangerously insidious conflation. People have blindly adopted the term ‘Smart Growth’ without amy real intellectual conviction.The idea that the goal of regional policy should be a never-ending increase in income (GDP) is to my mind crazy. How is this possible? If we take a so-called ‘sustainable growth’ (a clear oxymoron) rate of say 3% – the total size of the economy will double every 23 years. This is clearly unsustainable and therefore should not be the goal of public policy. Almost everybody agrees that GDP is a very bad measure of human progress ..but what you measure is what you will aim for ..this is not very smart to me.
August 20, 2012 at 2:43 pm
[…] and, well – ideally – other government departments! You know – that “joined-up government” that everyone thinks would be a good […]
August 21, 2012 at 4:54 am
Outstanding post once again.. Thank you.