The Legitimating Process of Regional Development Agencies

1 In this paper I discuss the research question to what extant planning contributes to the legitimacy of regional development agencies in Norway. The point of departure is that new regional policy is based on a governance regime, but in practice the new governance structure seems to exist in the shadow of the old governance structure. In fact regional planning and development work more and more seem to take the form of a two-parallel system; a government dominated and highly sectorised regional planning and governance based territorial planning that tries to foster collaboration. Regional development agencies are the key actors in the territorial planning, but they are often rather weak constructions that depend highly on the trust between the participants in the agencies, their willingness to collaborate, their commitment to the regional development work etc. I construct the model of a political legitimating planning process based on Habermas term political will-formatting process and my own research in the field of regional planning and development, in order to discuss the requirements that are needed in order to make these regional development agencies strong and legitimate regional development actors. My conclusion is a kind of dilemma. As a part of the governance regime, the regional development agencies need to be strong enough to influence their participants from the government regime, but is that possible in regional development agencies where the participants are free to leave. Government, governance and new public management In the regional planning and development work, we often talk about a shift in regional policymaking and planning characterised by a new process of governing. Regional governance structure has been added to the regional government structure, but the governance structure seems to live in the shadow of the government structure (Jessop 1997), and the regional planning and development agencies as part of the governance structure are rather weak political institutions. From the research into regional planning and development processes we know that the shift of regime started in the 1970’s. It was then the dominating accumulation regime with its emphasis on large-scale enterprises and mass production, was hit by economic stagnation and staff reductions in the large companies. Focus than was placed on a more flexible accumulation regime with great emphasis on innovation and growth in employment in small and medium-sized companies in clusters (Stohr 1990). This shift of regime has had consequences on our perspective on governing, planning, policy making, organisation etc. (Bukve and Amdam 2004). The New Public Management (NPM) reforms have been a significant driving force in the transformation of public sector from government to governance. A dominating idea in the 1 A draft version of this paper was presented for the ISMR seminar Faroe Islands, Klaksvik and Vagur, August 2005