RSA Early Career Grant Scheme

Previous and Current Grant Holders

The aim of this research project is to investigate the operation and assess the added value of the EU cohesion policy’s special support instruments. By investigating the implementation of JESSICA and JASPER schemes and their impacts and spill-over effects in two of the Central and Eastern European EU member states, the study will fill a major research gap and offer a valuable contribution to the policy debate and scholarly literature on EU cohesion policy, multi-level governance and urban development.

Moreover, the study aims at contributing to improvement of the policy practice by identifying barriers for successful implementation of special support instruments and generating recommendations for policy-makers at EU, national and sub-national levels.

Julie Tian Miao

Title: The Disjuncture of National and Local Policy Strategies in Chinese Cities: Exploring the Interface of Affordable Housing Strategies and Human Capital Market

This research argues that the confounding nature of Sino-capitalism (Peck & Zhang, 2013) is exacerbated by disjuncture between China’s centralised aims and controls and its emerging array of decentralised local governance choices. While the discrepancies within either China’s techno-economic domain (TED) or social-institutional domain (SID) have been discussed (see for example Yeung, 2000), the incoherence between these domains remains overlooked. This study proposes an exploration of the interface between i) labour market policies, underpinning the growth of the knowledge economy and driven by increasingly decentralised TED policies, and ii) the provision of affordable housing, fashioned by centralised SID policies that retain China’s socialist aims for social stability. In the UK housing for key workers remains a concern (Maclennan and O’Sullivan 2013). In China, however, the housing-labour market interface is likely to be more problematic as a result of the potential governance disjuncture – with companies driven by the market logic and households competing for homes in the state system of affordable housing provision. Therefore this research aims to:
(1) Profile Chinese policy evolutions and governance for labour markets and affordable housing;
(2) Identify disjunctures in the different mixes of state-market relations in different regions;
(3) Identify civil society and government responses to emerging problems.

I-Chun Catherine Chang

Follow the Money: The Financing and Financialization of Sustainable Urban Projects in China

The recent two decades have witnessed a surge of urban sustainable projects in the global South. Under the guidance of relational geography and “Southern” urbanism, following the movement of planning ideas and policies has been the primary method scholars use to study these evolving urbanism models. This approach, however, largely overlooks the increasing importance of the profit-driven and technology-oriented urban sustainability industry. Nor does it offer insight into the indispensable role of financial arrangements in facilitating and shaping sustainable urbanism models. To address these shortcomings in the endeavor to understand sustainable urbanism, I propose to develop a new research approach that centers on tracing financial and economic interests. Adopting this new approach, this project aims to analyze the financial arrangements underlying Chinese sustainable urban projects, and focuses on two major Sino-Singaporean sustainable urban projects as relational-comparative case studies. This approach helps understand the influence of project funders, the allocation of critical resources, the workings of the urban sustainability industry, and the competition between sustainable urbanism models.

Iris Wanzenböck

Knowledge network dynamics in the presence of shocks: A network-based approach to regional resilience

My project aims at understanding how regional knowledge networks can stimulate regional economic resilience. This ambition is motivated by theories considering knowledge networks crucial for regions to gain, after a crisis, impetus towards renewal. Yet, empirical evidence on the dynamics of knowledge networks, their changing compositions or role for regional resilience is scarce. My project aims at (i) providing new indicators to systematically explore network dynamics, (ii) developing a topology to characterize network profiles for European regions, (iii) assessing how these network compositions relate to regional resilience for the case of the economic crisis in 2008. In this project I will develop regional indicators to capture the micro-based dynamics in network compositions and make use of large-scale network data to classify European regions according to these indicators. On this basis, I will investigate whether network re-bundling can explain regional renewal processes after the crisis

Mia M. Bennett

Effects of Indigenous Land Rights on Land Use Decisions

Project summary: Responding to calls within Indigenous communities to more closely examine land claims processes, this project aims to understand whether land tenure in Indigenous communities leads to attitudes and policies favoring development or conservation. I will employ a mixed-methods approach combining globally-scaled satellite night-light imagery and fieldwork in two sites: Alaska, USA, which has a strong Indigenous land tenure regime, and Sarawak, Malaysia, which has a comparably weak one. While a significant amount of research has examined the processes driving land claims, it is not well understood how development proceeds once land claims are won. Furthermore, research regarding Indigenous peoples is often highly localized rather than comparative. Instead, through global analysis and comparison of case studies in North America and Asia, this research will broaden understandings of the relationship between land tenure, development, and conservation at a range of scales. Although Indigenous peoples are often imagined as stewards of the environment, this research asks whether the securing of Indigenous land tenure may actually lead to greater support for industrial development. As Indigenous peoples are gaining greater land rights worldwide, it is critical to understand the possible consequences of this shift in tenure for local livelihoods, the environment, and industry.

Thomas Skuzinski

Reimagining metropolitan fragmentation: The Local Autonomy Project

The fragmentation of metropolitan regions into dozens and sometimes hundreds of general-purpose local governments has for decades been at the heart of a debate about optimal metropolitan governance. Scholars have long recognized that fragmentation is a complex concept capable of measurement through multiple dimensions. Early measures focused on raw counts of general-purpose governments within a region, or counts per capita. Recognizing that such measures failed to capture the economic diversity between central cities and among different suburbs, measures began to incorporate political and economic market share through concentration and diffusion. The goal of such measures is to incorporate multiple dimensions of fragmentation to better proxy our expectations for how large and small jurisdictions—in both the economic and political senses—might be expected to behave when resolving tensions between local and regional interests. The general expectation is that higher fragmentation—however it is measured—will lead to a greater likelihood of parochial behaviors in which local interests are prioritized due to the demands of political and fiscal responsiveness on local decision-makers. While these measures have allowed valuable insights into how metropolitan regions function, they do not adequately incorporate the highly heterogeneous autonomy granted by states to local governments. This study proposes a framework and method for objective and subjective measures of local autonomy. The former requires content analysis of constitutional provisions, state legislation, and case law, while the latter relies on large-n survey of local elected and administrative officials, using hypothetical scenarios to determine how these actors perceive the state-local relationship. The primary goals of the research are to use these measures of autonomy as a complement to fragmentation measures, and to explore how local autonomy affects (1) the function and formation of regional governance organizations in metropolitan areas and (2) regional outcomes in policy domains where local and regional tensions can often lead to suboptimal systems, including transportation, land use, and infrastructure.

Thomas Skuzinski is Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Global Forum for Urban and Regional Resilience at Virginia Tech. His research applies a sociological institutionalist lens to understand how variation in rules, norms, and cultural worldviews shape decision-making in local governments and metropolitan areas. He is especially interested in the nexus of land use, infrastructure, and economic development policies in Rust Belt and Appalachia, and is the founder of the Global Forum Research Network in Post-Industrial Resilience, which seeks to further comparative scholarship of de-industrializing geographies. Dr. Skuzinski’s most recent book, The Risk of Regional Governance (Routledge 2018), used original large-n surveys of local elected officials to explore the cultural cognition of interlocal cooperation in suburban communities in Grand Rapids and Detroit, Michigan. His current research projects focus on developing indices to measure transportation governance and local autonomy in metropolitan areas in the U.S., and has been funded by the Department of Transportation and Regional Studies Association. He received doctoral and master degrees in urban and regional planning from University of Michigan, and a Juris Doctor from Michigan State University.

Anne-Marie Jeannet

Political Disaffection in Europe’s Rust Belt Regions

The aim of this project is to understand how a sustained decline in manufacturing has altered democratic life in affected societies. The central question of the project is: How has regional and local deindustrialization brought about a disenchantment with mainstream politics? The project focuses on two possible mechanisms through which deindustrialization produces a climate of political disaffection in a society which are based on opposing (but not mutually exclusive) theoretical traditions. The first mechanism is grounded in institutional theory and sees the origins of political disaffection as a rational process that is politically endogenous. The other possible mechanism is through “bottom-up” gradual cultural change that is exogenous to political institutions. According to this reasoning, deindustrialization may transform social relations, which is widely considered a necessary ingredient for democratic and civic life.This project offers theoretical insights into how, over time, deindustrialization has reshaped the relationship citizens have with national politics.

Sylvia Ying He

China’s resource-based cities in the shrinking paradigm: population change, economic revitalisation, and urban liveability

Traditional planning paradigms have long concentrated on urban growth, and governance has been primarily oriented toward strengthening the role of cities as “growth machines” (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Therefore, officials, urban policymakers and planners tend to stigmatise urban shrinkage. In fact, urban growth can reach a point where the negative externalities of development dominate agglomeration economies, reducing the attractiveness of large cities. Given that certain urban problems cannot be easily solved during the growth stage, can they nevertheless be better tackled during the shrinking paradigm in urban development? With a focus on China’s resource-based cities, this research aims to identify whether shrinking cities are better than growing cities at dissolving agglomeration diseconomies and to assess current government policies in terms of their effectiveness at revitalising the local economies of resource-based cities while not sacrificing liveability. Resource-based cities have played a crucial role in China’s economic development, but they have also accumulated various pressing problems such as resource depletion (He, 2014), unbalanced industrial structures, economic downturn, unemployment and environmental pollution. Many local governments of resource-based cities are concerned about the slowdown of economic growth and focus on the economic restructuring of traditional industry (He et al., 2017). However, little is known about whether the urban liveability of these cities has been improved. This study is expected to fill the research gap and provide a broader set of policy recommendations to local governments in China. After all, there are more aspects to defining a liveable city than just economic indicators.

Max D. Woodworth

Project Title: Assessing project-led development in China’s new towns

Since the introduction of a nationwide market-based urban land system in 1988, municipal governments in China have shifted their focus from management of the planned economy to spatial planning for the purpose of enhancing economic growth. The production of space has become a key driver of local economies and has profoundly reshaped the operations of city governments, as land now serves as a vital source of revenue and a focal point for intra-state conflict as well as social contention. Municipalities’ emphasis on land development has fostered massive-scale spatial change through project-led urban growth. A proliferating form of project-led growth in the 2000s has been the new town, which I understand as multi-functional urban megaprojects. This research project aims to assess the politics of new-town development in China’s cities through analysis of planning, design, and the political economy of land development. Special focus will be placed on the isomorphic and temporal qualities of project-led growth with the aim of understanding the processes and implications of cities’ turn to urban megaprojects as a desired path to economic growth and prosperity.

Leslie James Mabon

Governing the low-carbon energy transition in fossil fuel-dependent coastal regions: a comparativestudy of Iwaki and Iburi in Japan

The project evaluates how two former coal-mining coastal regions in Japan – Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture, and Iburi in Hokkaido – face the challenge of balancing the short-term employment and economic benefits that continue to be derived from fossil fuels, with the longer-term imperative to establish a sustainable economic base for the region and contribute to national and international climate change mitigation objectives. In Iwaki, the regional government’s drive to deploy renewable energy (offshore wind energy and biomass) comes at the same time as the proposed expansion of two coal-fired power stations led by the national government, and ongoing concern over risks posed by coastal energy infrastructure after the region received contamination from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. In Iburi, meanwhile, expansion in mega-solar and offshore carbon dioxide storage trials are taking place alongside a continued reliance on oil refining and metal production, against a bigger backdrop of relatively recent the decline of Japan’s coal mining industry. At the same time, both Iwaki and Iburi feel the effects of change in the marine environment, Iwaki due to radioactive contamination from the Fukushima accident and Iburi due to climate changes altering the marine ecosystem. The Iwaki and Iburi regions therefore provide a challenging test case for some of the complexities moving to a low-carbon economy may pose for regional development, and apply the emerging concept of a ‘managed transition’ from fossil fuel industries to the Japanese context.
Read about Leslie`s research here: https://regions.regionalstudies.org/ezine/article/balancing-industry-identity-and-the-environment-how-a-carbon-intensive-city-in-northern-japan-is-narrating-a-low-carbon-transition/

Grants

This award is open to individual applicants in their early career (five years maximum between the date showing on the certificate and the application deadline). Applicants must be based within an eligible higher education institution and must be a current, early career member of the RSA and throughout the duration of the grant (please note that applicants may apply for membership at the same time as applying for the grant).

The RSA Early Career Grant (EC) is provided to support a discrete piece of regional studies and/or regional science research. The value of the grant is up to £10,000 (c. $12,700; c. €11,200). The grant has a maximum time span of 18 months and reporting conditions apply. The full Terms and Conditions governing the grant are available in the EC Handbook.

Please send your Expression of Interest application and queries to ecgrant@regionalstudies.org

Forthcoming deadline: 28th May 2020

A two stage application process is used for the RSA Early Career Grant. The Expression of Interest should be a maximum of 3 pages long and should include the following (see details in the handbook):

Applicant information details: Title, name, surname
RSA membership number
Postal address
Telephone number and email
Name of Higher Education Institution (HEI)
Title of the research project
Timings of the research
Details of research and the advances it is hoped to make
Brief overview of costs and budget