2026 RSA Regional Futures Conference

Organised by Andy Pike, CURDS, Newcastle University, and Mia Gray, University of Cambridge as part of the RSA Network MuniFisc led by Paul Gilbert, University of Sussex, and Calvin Chung, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 

State Capitalism as Urban Nationalism
Heather Whiteside (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Set against the secular decline in municipal funding through long run austerity and program restructuring, a recent revival of state capitalist economic intervention is shaking up the fiscal-finance landscape for Canada’s largest cities. In an era of both deteriorating international conditions and unsustainably high housing sector costs, policymakers’ go-to solutions increasingly feature federal state owned enterprise (SOE) solutions, namely Build Canada Homes (BCH), Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB), Canada Lands Company (CLC), and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Picking up on leading examples, this paper examines the extent to which national state capitalism unfolds in unique ways through SOE activity at the urban scale. Examples include: the CIB’s Infrastructure for Housing Initiative (affecting site preparation, zoning, and mobility), CLC’s Public Land Bank (involving land sales of federally owned property to urban commercial property developers), CMHC’s Housing Design Catalogue (offering regionally differentiated designs and building codes), and BCH partnerships with municipalities (fast tracking private development). The paper’s analysis thus highlights notable uneven impacts of state capitalism on urban planning, municipal finance, land ownership, the location of new build housing, and project design.

 

Locating blended finance in shifting state – capital relations in the age of climate change
Hulya Dagdeviren and Christina Wolf (University of Hertfordshire, UK)

The blended finance approach to advancing green transition has often been criticised as a means for states to de-risk private investment. In this paper, we argue that blended finance functions not only as a de-risking instrument but also as a mechanism for re-making markets that forecloses possibilities for public and collective forms of ownership and control over assets and resources. Decarbonisation and the transition away from fossil fuels open opportunities for decentralised energy supply, enabling the development of publicly, collectively, or individually owned systems with the potential to overcome existing market failures inherent in oligopolistic, privately operated energy regimes. Casting blended finance as the only viable option for financing transition is a statecraft that reconfigures state – private capital relations. Focusing on energy decarbonisation at the local level, we demonstrate how energy is re-commodified, energy markets are remade, and the dominance of private finance and supply is further entrenched.

 

Speculative statecraft?: Cape Town’s fiscal experiences with energy transition
Liza Rose Cirolia, (Université Gustave Eiffel, École d’Urbanisme de Paris (EUP), Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), France; University of Cape Town, African Centre for Cities, South Africa)

Historically, the City of Cape Town, and most other local authorities in South Africa, raised a considerable proportion of municipal revenue through the sale of electricity to local consumers. Buying in bulk from the monopoly utility, Eskom, the City used tariff design to capture surplus from energy sales. In the last 15 years, a rising block tariffing model was core to the developmental state project, at once enabling redistribution and fiscal security. Following the electricity crisis, the last four years have seen a transformation in the role of the local state in electricity. In this paper, I suggest that the developmental state is in transition, giving way to two distinct modes of fiscal statecraft: the platform state and the merchant state. The platform state speaks to Cape Town’s emerging role as a network intermediary. Using the material grid, new forms of legal contracts, and digital tracking/accounting to “remediate” the energy landscape, Cape Town’s fiscal architecture is being reformatted. This project is underpinned by a speculative imaginary of a distributed, modular, and interconnected network, where production is decentralized and risk spread among diverse players. An even more speculative potential is Cape Town’s role in the open energy market, already under development nationally but currently excluding municipalities. Cape Town, framed as (the most) exceptional local authority in South Africa, may be allowed direct participation in the open market (subject to changes in local government financial legislation). This open market would place considerable risk on the City, as it moves to buy energy at variable prices, while reselling it at fixed tariffs. I further argue that the somewhat banal municipal contract will be the site through which these speculative projects are made fiscally manageable, thus making their development and implementation central to contemporary debates about sub-national finance in South Africa.

 

Understanding persistent austerity and local fiscal distress
Hulya Dagdeviren (University of Hertfordshire, UK), Mia Gray and Hannah Hasenberger (London School of Economics, UK)

This paper provides a cross-country analysis of the depth and duration of subnational austerity across Western Europe.  We show that the UK is an outlier within the European experience of urban austerity – particularly in the depth and persistence of the subnational regime of austerity. Drawing on a constructivist approach and discourse analysis, we investigate four case studies of local government bankruptcy within the UK to highlight the techniques used to reinforce austerity as a solution to fiscal distress.  We show that local government failures are frequently framed as problems of internal mismanagement rather than systemic underfunding.

The ‘Agency’ of the Local State in Times of Financial Constraint
Jack Newman (University of Liverpool, UK)

Over the last two decades, the local state in many countries has faced increasing financial pressure. Reductions in income streams and increased demand for services have come on the back of decades of hollowing out of local capacity. National governments have contributed towards this crisis, from the steady tightening of budgets to intentional strategies to shift blame downwards. This paper considers the ‘agency’ of local institutions in response to these financial challenges. This first entails a conceptual discussion about the utility of ‘agency’ in this context: is agency is the right lens to understand the constrained powers of local institutions; and what does the wider structure-agency literature tell us about national-local relations? The paper then uses an empirical case study to explore these theoretical questions. In the UK, local government and local health services are both institutions of the local state. While the two have separate systems of funding and accountability to national government, they also try to work together on issues such as public health, social care, and complex need. In both institutions, local leaders employ various strategies to maximise their agency in the face of increasing financial constraints and service demand. Analysis shows that ‘institutional agency’ is a problematic oversimplification in this context, and that a focus on the agency of individual persons provides a more accurate lens to understand power and constraint within the local state. The powers and funding of institutions are better understood as a multi-level system of structural constraint that also constrains national policymakers in their attempt to realise policy objectives.

 

The impacts of local councils going bust and trying to recover on people and places
Andy Pike (Newcastle University, UK) and Mia Gray (University of Cambridge, UK)

The spate of local councils in England going bust from 2018 and trying to recover generated substantial impacts upon their people and places. These included: expenditure freezes, controls, and reductions; organisational restructuring and job losses; infrastructure and service withdrawal and rationalisation; asset sales and transfers; temporary local Council Tax increases; refinanced debts; industrial action; and local contestation and protest. Local statecraft and the inter-relations between agency and structure shift decisively once a Section 114 report for an unbalanced annual budget is issued. Current responses are somewhat ad hoc, opaque, and reactive, reflecting the acute national and local political sensitivities involved in councils going bust. National statecraft is struggling since temporary fixes for the councils have largely proved insufficient relative to the scale of their lingering and compounding financial problems. While such situations are complex, difficult, and time consuming to resolve, few of the councils with unbalanced budgets are heading towards financial recovery, sustainability, and resilience. National statecraft has reproduced the dual polity narrative that ‘Whitehall knows best’, local councils lack capacity and competence, and are undeserving of meaningful decentralisation of further powers and resources.

Session Organiser: Shiri M. Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada

Universities are increasingly expected to act as anchor institutions that drive regional innovation, economic development, and societal resilience. Beyond their traditional missions of teaching and research, they are now central to entrepreneurship, knowledge exchange, collaborative research, talent development, and the mobilisation of public investment. At the same time, governments across many countries have adopted place-based innovation policies that position universities as key partners in addressing regional challenges and building innovation ecosystems. This session explores how universities fulfil these evolving roles and the institutional, organisational, and network capabilities that enable them to generate regional impact.

Bringing together conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented perspectives, the session examines universities as organisations that mobilise people, partnerships, resources, and funding to strengthen regional innovation systems. It considers how universities contribute through entrepreneurial ecosystems, interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge exchange, and strategic research investment, while recognising that these activities are shaped by institutional capabilities and the characteristics of the regions in which universities operate. Collectively, the papers highlight the importance of collaboration across universities, industry, government, and civil society, and demonstrate that universities’ contributions extend well beyond technology transfer and commercialisation to include broader innovation, capacity building, and societal value creation.

The session contributes to contemporary debates on entrepreneurial universities, regional innovation systems, and place-based development by offering new insights into how universities organise for regional engagement and how these efforts can be better understood and evaluated. It will be of interest to scholars of innovation, entrepreneurship, higher education, economic geography, and public policy, as well as policymakers and university leaders seeking to strengthen the role of universities in fostering inclusive and sustainable regional development.

The Role of Academic Entrepreneurship in Local Ecosystem Development

• David Charles, Northumbria University, UK

The growth of academic entrepreneurship has developed alongside the growing interest by both academics and policymakers in the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This is no coincidence, as the focus of policymakers and universities on the opportunities for academic and graduate spin-offs created a rationale for investment in support programmes within the university and in the local area. The emergence of science parks, usually attached to universities initiated a wider concern for how to support entrepreneurial businesses in order to achieve regional development goals. As universities have sought to work with partners to develop their own local ecosystems for firm formation this has created demand for external support such as venture funding but also stimulated the wider entrepreneurship support system in the wider city and region. There has thus been a symbiotic development between the support developed in universities and the ecosystem in the wider region.

This paper examines the emergence of the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how both the concept and its implementation in policy has been shaped by academic entrepreneurship. The intellectual roots and definition of ecosystems are first developed, before an assessment of the role of university infrastructures in those ecosystems. Universities have played four main roles: as direct providers of support to the wider region (often with public funding), as partners in collaborative activities, as providers of knowledge and advice, and as inspiration for policy. The paper draws on examples from the UK from both high and low intensity regions illustrating the roles that universities have taken in each case.

HEIS, Graduate Labour, Innovation and Regional Economic Development

• Helen Lawton Smith, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
• Bill O’Gorman, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland
• Richard Hayes, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland

This study contributes to the literature on the regional innovation impacts of human capital formation by HEIs .as the primary driver of regional innovation, often surpassing physical infrastructure in importance (Martinidis et al. 2022). It does this by providing data on the inter-relationship between the changing economic profile South East Ireland (firms, sectors), national policies which have direct and indirect effects on university teaching strategies and the response of the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) (now part of South East Technological University, SETU) to its regional remit through recruitment and graduation of students leading to high levels of knowledge transfer.

It is argued that whilst evidence does exist that HEIs contribute significantly to innovation-led regional economic development through their graduates (Rérat, 2014, Krabel and Flöther, 2012, Venhorst, et al. 2011; Venhorst et al., 2010), much less is known about the extent to which graduates from HEIs have agency in intervening in processes of business innovation thereby contributing to the innovative capability and capacity of the region in which they are educated. This is through their choice of HEI and the degrees they take and then their first destination employment. As Incera et al. (2021) point out, such impacts are not evenly distributed geographically within countries.

From Research Excellence to Regional Innovation: How Canadian Universities Mobilize Large-Scale Public Funding

• Silvia Iossa, Santa Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy
• Shiri Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada

Governments increasingly use competitive research funding to strengthen research excellence, foster collaboration, and support regional innovation. While previous research has examined the impacts of competitive funding on scientific performance, less is known about how universities organise and mobilise large institutional grants and how these processes shape research capacity and regional value creation.

This paper examines the first two Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) competitions, which funded eighteen major research initiatives across seventeen Canadian universities. Drawing on perspectives from research funding, regional innovation systems, and the geography of innovation, the study investigates how universities mobilise large-scale funding, how this influences research collaboration and organisational capacity, and why outcomes vary across institutional and regional contexts. By shifting attention from funding outcomes to funding mobilisation, the paper contributes new insights into the organisational capabilities that enable universities to translate major research investments into scientific, economic, and regional benefits.

Embedding Global R&D in a Regional Innovation Ecosystem – A Longitudinal Case Study of a University Spin-out in Scotland

• Fumi Kitagawa, University of Birmingham, UK

Over the years, a spinout company from a university can become a high value contributor to the regional innovation ecosystem. To capture the value of innovative spinout firms, coordinated ecosystem strategies that align national and regional industrial priorities, infrastructure investments, and market-building initiatives are needed (Roupakia and Ulrichsen, 2025). However, when ownership of the venture becomes foreign, the regional innovation community faces one of the most persistent policy dilemmas. On the one hand, acquisition is often a success indicator — it validates the technology, rewards founders and investors, and brings global visibility. On the other hand, it can lead to loss of local control, offshoring of high value activities, and erosion of regional spillovers if the acquiring firm relocates R&D, IP, or manufacturing. Drawing on a case study of an evolution of a university spinout over the years in Scotland, this study presents the role of university anchored inward investment and long term multinational R&D strategies being embedded within a regional innovation ecosystem. Relevant policy lessons and ecosystem-level recommendations to other regions in the UK and beyond will be identified.

Understanding Universities’ Internal Capabilities and Resources for Effective Regional Engagement

• Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo, University of Manchester, UK
• Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester, UK
• Xiuqin Li, University of Manchester, UK
• Daniel Cuesta Delgado, Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), Spain

Universities are increasingly recognised as anchor institutions that support innovation, skills development, and regional resilience alongside teaching and research. In the UK, recent policy initiatives have placed universities at the centre of regional development, although their capacity to contribute varies across institutions and places. This study examines the institutional factors underpinning regional engagement and how these contributions are measured, combining a literature review with text-mining analysis of Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) narratives. The review highlights universities’ evolution towards entrepreneurial and mission-oriented roles, using both commercial and collaborative knowledge exchange mechanisms. Analysis of KEF3 (2023) narratives from 125 English higher education institutions examines four themes: stakeholders, mechanisms, resources, and impacts. Findings show growing emphasis on partnerships beyond industry and widespread public and community engagement, while growth narratives remain focused on commercialisation. Internal capabilities are largely framed through formal governance, and reported impacts remain dominated by economic outcomes, with less attention to social, cultural, and civic contributions. The findings highlight the need to align institutional capabilities with regional ecosystems, strengthen impact measurement, and adopt place-sensitive policy approaches.

Collaboration Networks Within and Emerging Interdisciplinary Field

• Shiri Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada
• Paige Clayton, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
• Mircea Gherghina, Brown University, United States

We ask how researcher background characteristics shape the breadth and diversity of collaboration networks during a policy driven stage of interdisciplinary scientific field emergence. Scientific collaboration networks are critical for productivity and innovation, with the number, quality, and diversity of connections significantly influencing output. Specifically, we explore the heterogeneity of tie formation across three distinct network dimensions: field-specific ties, geographic homophily, and organizational foci. Our research context is a University of Toronto-based initiative, Medicine by Design (MbD) which was created through a Canadian national funding program to develop a regenerative medicine ecosystem in the region through targeted research funding. Our sample is all 168 funded principal investigators who received research funding through this interdisciplinary initiative. Using a panel dataset from 2015 to 2022, our findings demonstrate how researchers differentially form collaboration networks based on their individual characteristics, fostering interdisciplinary connections and driving research in an emerging field.