Spaces of Collibration: The Governance and Metagovernance of Failure

This essay offers a geographical political economy explanation to the failed state of the local and regional economic growth and development in England’s regions. The essay advances the field of inquiry known as metagovernance and increasingly multispatial metagovernance, i.e., how complex problems of economic life and the existence of various failures — market failure, state failure, and governance failure — necessitates a focus on governance coordination and its complex geographies. Taking metagovernance as a point of departure, the term “spaces of collibration”, taken initially from the work of Dunsire (1993, 1994
& 1996) and developed by Jessop (2016a, 2016b & 2020), is deployed to capture how altering the relative balance within and between different modes of spatial coordination through state intervention shapes the governance of local and regional economic development.
Collibration critically gets behind how uneven development and state intervention in sub-national economic development is managed by creating an unstable equilibrium of compromise, which in turn helps to explain the governance of failure.