Memorandum 35
Submission from the Board of the Regional
Studies Association
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
We were very pleased to have the opportunity
to make a response to this consultation in our positions of Board
Member and Chief Executive of, the Regional Studies Association.
In making some comments we have chosen to concentrate on the issue
of the case for a regional science policy versus a national science
policy and whether the Haldane principle needs updating. We hope
that you will find our comments constructive and helpful.
BACKGROUND—THE
REGIONAL STUDIES
ASSOCIATION
The Regional Studies Association is a learned
society working at the interface between regional development,
policy and research. We were founded in the early 1960s in direct
competition to the American-founded Regional Science Association
(now Regional Science Association International). Our Association
was uniquely different to this organisation in that, coming at
a time when the British Government was seeking to introduce a
National Plan with concomitant regional planning bodies and interventions,
the founding members were clear that a part of the role of the
new organisation would be to interface with those in the policy
and practice communities and to seek to inform, through the provision
of evidence, the decisions that were taken. A key part of this
aim was the deliberate inclusion of non-academics within the membership
body at both individual and corporate levels. This background
flavours much of what the Association thinks is important today.
The Association today is very much international
in membership, reach and ambition. Our publishing programme is
international particularly through our two journals, Regional
Studies and Spatial Economic Analysis; our major annual
conference takes place in continental Europe each year (Leuven,
Belgium, April 2009) and the Association has organised, and will
continue to organise, events in North America. Our improved financial
position over time means that we are now able to fund research
networking activity and are currently supporting fifteen groups
on topics such as Mediterranean and Balkan Regional Development;
Theorising Regional Development: the theoretical background
of new concepts in regional studies; Green Regional Innovation:
Entrepreneurship and Governance and Bridging old and new
divisions in regional governance between "core" and
"periphery" in Europe's East and West. The Association
is very keen that no-one be excluded from its activities and to
that end has introduced territorial membership pricing and conference
attendance fees for its annual conference based on GDP on a price
parity basis. We have recently launched a new and ambitious Development
Plan setting out our aims for the years to 2013. Key among these
aims is the influencing of policy debate and practice. We have
attached a copy of the plan to give you more information but in
short we are to:
— Promote the use and uptake of regional
studies research and knowledge in public and political fora so
as to influence policy and practice;
— Provide policy makers, academics,
practitioner, public bodies and opinion formers with informed
views about regional issues;
— Engage with the media to ensure that
views from the Association are represented and that information
on regional studies research and knowledge is readily available;
and,
— Encourage debate across nation states
at the international scale.
The comments which follow are couched very much
in terms of our field of expertise and interest—the relationship
between space, place and regional development. They also draw
on papers published within Regional Studies in a special issue
entitled "Governance, Science Policy and Regions"
(Volume 41, Number 8th November 2007).
EVIDENCE
Our submission here is primarily focused on
"the case for a regional science policy (versus national
science policy) and whether the Haldane principle needs updating",
and the related issue of the role of different stakeholders, particularly
at sub-national level, in "determining UK science and engineering
policy".
A core issue and concern of RSA members for many
years has been the uneven distribution of R&D and innovation
between regions in the UK. Work published by the association in
its journal Regional Studies over many years has mapped out these
uneven distributions and some of the causes within the UK. Indeed
one of the first published papers on this topic was published
in Regional Studies in 1970 (Buswell and Lewis). In particular
the role of central government in establishing its own R&D
facilities, government procurement contracts, and higher education
policy have all played a part in the creation of a concentration
of R&D in the South of the UK, with relatively poor levels
of performance in the North and periphery. The current pattern
is the legacy of policies over many decades—Carol Heim(1988)
showed from public records how decisions on the locations of public
research facilities in the 1950s were biased in favour of the
South for reasons which would now be politically unacceptable.
The combination of public research facilities and elite universities
in the South has greatly strengthened the science infrastructure
in those regions. In the North and periphery of the UK the weakness
of the regional innovation system is a major problem in the economic
performance of these regions, and limits the UK's ability to match
the national level of R&D in GDP of our main competitor nations,
our innovativeness in manufactured products in particular, and
ultimately national productivity. Science and research in the
regions outside of the golden triangle is heavily focused on the
universities and a weak public sector combined with a weak private
sector limits the possibilities for endogenous development.
In this the UK can be contrasted with a number
of other countries—Germany and Finland for example where
both public and private research activity is much more widely
distributed and also at a higher absolute level. In federal systems
of government such as Germany, but also the US, Australia and
increasingly Spain, there is often a greater role for the regions
or states in research and science policy, and there is a stronger
link between the investments made in regions and the development
of regional innovation systems. The UK is becoming a partial federal
system, with the devolved nations pursuing their own science and
innovation policies, but with an ambivalence in England as to
the need for a regional role in science. Thus Scotland is in a
position to develop its own science strategy encompassing public
research, university research infrastructure and economic development
incentives, but the Northern regions of England lack these powers
and see little direct support from national government for increased
science. The six Science Cities could provide such a focus but
as yet have seen no new money, other than that available through
the RDAs.
Thus we would argue that there is a need for
a less uneven distribution of research in the UK, which implies
a change in science policy to a position that favours some new
investment in those regions which are currently lagging. There
are three principal issues that need to be addressed in that though:
the difficulty of relocating existing research activity, the importance
of critical mass, and the challenge to the Haldane principle that
decisions on science investments should be made on scientific
grounds by scientists and not for political reasons.
First, on the issue of relocation, there has
been some relocation of R&D in recent years, although little
of this has benefited the regions with low R&D. Indeed the
privatisation of the utilities and some government research centres
saw a reduction of employment in research in the peripheral regions,
with the North West and North East particularly losing out. Overall
government has reduced its own internal research activity in recent
years placing a stronger emphasis on the universities to undertake
basic research leading to long term economic spillovers. In many
of our competitor countries we see government playing a stronger
role in supporting the development of new technologies, and this
often being supported by regional governments—whether the
German Laender, Catalonia, US states or Australian states such
as Queensland and Victoria. Both Catalonia and Victoria have been
involved in funding synchrotron developments for example. As part
of a long term investment in science government could look at
new regionally devolved infrastructures which complement the work
of the universities and help to underpin regional development
strategies.
Another argument that is often levelled at any
discussion of greater decentralisation of research is the need
for critical mass. It is clear that parts of the UK do indeed
have critical mass in international terms through a concentration
of public, private and university research. Given that there is
an acknowledged need to increase the level of R&D in the UK,
which may imply additional public sector investment, then should
additional resources be placed in these existing concentrations—on
the basis that economies of scale and scope will produce better
outcomes—or should they be used to develop new concentrations
elsewhere. The recent evidence from the RAE suggests that excellence
can be found in most places, at least within the University system,
but there is no real evidence that further concentration will
yield better scientific outcomes. To some degree further concentration
can lead to diseconomies of scale as all the usual consequences
of congestion kick in. High living costs, high labour turnover,
long commutes, and limited space for new businesses may reduce
the long term impact of new investment. Building new concentrations
of research in the English provincial cities, linked for example
with the Science City initiative may offer greater potential for
transformation and impacts on productivity.
This then raises questions about the kind of
science that should be located in different regions and therefore
the decision making processes involved and who should be involved
in those processes, and inevitably the Haldane principle, where
it should apply, and whether a modified version is needed. The
Haldane principle is generally only applied to research in the
research councils sector, and whilst there has been some shift
towards politically determined programmes in selected areas the
principle of academics deciding on the award of funds still holds.
This principle need not be altered dramatically to achieve a rebalancing
of research between regions as much of the emphasis needs to be
placed on creating new centres and facilities outside of the research
council remit. Within the university sector there remains scope
for some capacity building investments, even within a continued
system of blind refereeing by academic peers. Scotland's science
strategy co-exists with the national policy through the research
councils, and similar initiatives operate in other countries where
regions have a stronger role in infrastructure, but where national
science policies still operate on a non-political basis.
Inevitably there will be much debate about these
issues, and even within the Regional Studies Association there
may not be a consensus on these points. However, we believe there
are principles here that have not really been challenged by any
evidence that the current policy is best for the UK as a whole,
and that it would be beneficial to the country if that debate
was made more public.
REFERENCE
1. Development Plan 2008-2013, Regional
Studies Association, 2008, Seaford, "Governance, Science
Policy and Regions", Regional Studies, Volume 41, Number
8, November 2007.
January 2009
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