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In this paper, we consider the implications of assemblage as an analytical framework in the context of regional economic planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of territoriality to examine the efforts to create temporal stability in the emergent regional economy. We focus on the reterritorialisation of Central Otago through the district council's destination management project centred on the collective branding of the region as ' A World of Difference'. The implementation of this programme contends with the diverse, incongruent boundaries of emergent tourism activities. The paper, thus, addresses the potential for state initiatives to manage uncertain and ephemeral assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the utility of investigating regional economic policy (REP) as constituted through the interplay of imaginaries, political projects, and institutional arrangements. It frames REP in process terms-as continually 'in-the-making' and emerging out of the intersecting trajectories of ideas, policy, individuals, and other resources. The empirical focus is economic governance in Auckland, New Zealand, in the years following the widely publicised neoliberal reforms and profound economic restructuring of the l980s and early l990s. The analysis draws on the authors' particular positionality of being involved in knowledge production, both in academic and in policy arenas, and benefits from the development of a range of poststructural political economy methodologies by Auckland-based researchers. The concept of 'political project' is argued to be a useful analytical tool for linking circulating academic imaginaries, political initiatives, and particular policy rationales. By means of juxtaposing key aspects of particular economic imaginaries with political! policy initiatives and developments, it is shown that knowledge production for subnational economic governance is coconstitutive, contradictory, occurs on multiple geographical scales, and is mediated and remediated by place-specific and time-specific institutional actors. The methodological strategy of highlighting associations with the potential for interaction, rather than seeking causal processes, not only reveals the politicised nature of contextual facets of contemporary interventions, but promises to make a richer base for exploring possibilities for acting differently in urban and regional policy worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalisation in New Zealand has been driven further as a political project than in most other countries. After two decades of neoliberal economic policy, it is possible to examine how political-economic actors in subnational spaces have responded to vastly new conditions. I provide an account on how regional economic-development policy and planning has reappeared in Auckland in the postrestructuring period. By deploying relational-institutional and poststructural perspectives in the examination of key policy initiatives that coconstituted an emerging regional economic intervention trajectory, I discuss how economic governance has been assembled, assess its structural coherence and directionality, and analyse the role of the state. I argue that regional governance processes are characterised by contingencies, patterns of institutional experimentation, and, increasingly, the work of central state actors. What is not known to date, however, is whether new regulatory structures are having any major material effects on the course of New Zealand's largest regional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines how regional development policy in New Zealand has attempted to reshape the organizational and institutional foundations of regional growth and innovation since the government initiated the implementation of growth and innovation-focused policies in 2000. Dealing with the governance and the economic dimension, the paper elaborates on the challenges encountered in different regional environments that range from metropolitan areas to remote rural regions. The paper outlines New Zealand's institutional and economic framework and the set of programmes used to foster regional development and innovation. Principal lessons from New Zealand's experience are the importance of the institutional set-up in regions, the need to tailor initiatives to different regional contexts, and insights into the complex relationship between regional development and regional innovation policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]