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A previous paper on RIS3 assessed its potential to influence growth strategies and their delivery. It held that significant further investment work was needed in tools and techniques, data and intelligence, and innovation in leadership capacity and capabilities. It further asserted that such investment was needed to be part of a commitment to a long-run learning and evaluation process. This paper considers synergies and dissonances between these national approaches to development in England. In particular, it explores how far RIS represents a step change from previous approaches to innovation-led growth. Alternatively, is it more accurately an incremental facelift and rebranding of previous orthodoxies? Does it add value to or detract from national policy for England? What roles might the approach play in the so-called ‘devolution revolution’? Can the (small scale, ‘light touch’) Advisory Hub approach support and promote those roles? What, if anything, might the England experience have for other nations and regions of Europe? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, several European countries have undergone reforms that modified the distribution of allocated powers and/or the geographical area of intervention of local authorities. This paper focuses on the institution of metropolitan governments. National legislative and executive powers usually claim that they want to provide densely urbanized areas with a more integrative level of action. As a result, the public authorities in large cities would get a greater capacity to deal with issues such as economic growth, increased soil sealing, socio-spatial inequalities, etc. This paper explores the motivations and forms of such metropolitan reforms in three European countries within the last decade, with the creation of Combined Authorities in England, of métropoles in France and of citta metropolitane in Italy. We argue that the forms of metropolitan government that have emerged in the three countries are embedded in very different institutional systems (Section 2). Considering the strategies of key protagonists, we show that the new modes of governance differ across and sometimes within countries (Section 3). In particular, the spatiality and the autonomy of the new metropolitan governments vary in the three countries (Section 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon the practice of conservation applied through the planning systems of three European countries, Ireland, the Netherlands and England, here termed conservation-planning. The values and validated practice of conservation-planning are considered in terms of the concept of Authorised Heritage Discourses (AHDs) that are internationally-shaped but nationally articulated in each country, and by a distinct conservation-planning social entity that may be described as an 'assemblage'. The post-2008 period has seen over-arching economic similarities in economic and political forces affecting conservation-planning practice in each country. In each case public-sector austerity measures have been accompanied by ideological re-positionings over the role of the state and a greater emphasis upon 'selling the historic city' has been accompanied by a declining public-sector capacity to manage change within the frame of traditionally established AHDs. The partial withdrawal of the state has in each case resulted in adjustments in the construction of the assemblage and thus in the 'ownership' of the AHDs with a greater involvement of the private sector in these processes. Despite similarities in conservation discourse, shaped by an international AHD, differences exist between the countries considered, which we can better understand by reference to the conservation-planning assemblage in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]