I approached the 2026 RSA Annual Conference, my first one, with a simple question: when regions are governed through corridors, funding formulas, institutional arrangements and data infrastructures, who gets to shape those decisions, and whose interests remain outside the process? As a Colombian woman and EAFIT student working on questions of regional and climate governance, I was particularly interested in how gender, diversity and equity were understood not only as questions of representation, but also as questions of knowledge, authority and decision-making. Across the sessions I attended, the question kept reappearing somewhere deeper, in the categories through which regions are planned, the scales at which climate impacts are measured, the knowledge institutions recognise, and the data through which people and places become visible. This led me to think of equity not as a correction applied after regional policy is designed, but as a property of how it is designed in the first place.
The question begins with planning itself. The Spotlight session on Regions in Evolution: A History of Regional Planning traced how planning has opened beyond professional planners to diverse actors and competing interests, while also recovering marginalised voices and ideas lost from dominant accounts of the discipline. This matters because the history of planning is also a history of who was heard. Yet opening the process does not necessarily mean opening the criteria. Half a century after Rittel and Webber (1973) named the wicked problem, regional policy still often translates contested futures into technical exercises of optimisation; Head and Alford (2015) similarly frame wickedness through complexity and disagreement. Ostrom’s (2010) case for polycentric governance can be read not only as a question of efficiency, but also of voice and authority. We can widen participation while leaving unchanged who defines the evidence, the categories of analysis and who bears the cost.
The climate governance session made this distinction particularly visible. Across different cases of regional climate governance, the discussion moved between political rescaling, environmental monitoring, infrastructure change and socio-economic impact assessment. The latter idea stayed with me because an impact assessment is not simply a technical outcome produced after a decision has been framed. It helps construct the decision itself, determining who counts as affected, which impacts become visible and over what horizon. Sultana (2014) shows how climate impacts and responses are gendered through labour, mobility and access to resources, while Arora-Jonsson (2011) cautions against reducing women to either vulnerable victims or virtuous environmental stewards. The issue is not simply that different groups experience climate change differently, but that institutions distribute responsibilities, resources and recognition differently. Whoever defines the scale and categories of measurement also helps define the boundary of responsibility.
This question of whose knowledge counts was central to my own contribution to Decolonial Perspectives on Public Administration and Policy, where I co-presented Looking from the Bottom Up: Lessons from Community Climate Governance to Strengthen Adaptive Capacity in Medellín with Carlos Cadena-Gaitán. We began with the climate governance practices communities already develop, recognising their expertise and agency and asking what would allow these capacities to be recognised and resourced rather than merely consulted. The wider session brought together very different geographical and political contexts but shared the insight that knowledge about regions cannot be detached from the places and people from which it emerges. For me, this also resonated with the experience of participating in an international academic community from Colombia, where questions of whose knowledge travels, whose concepts become dominant and who gets to produce theory are particularly important. Roy (2009) captures this more broadly: the geography of theory is itself a distribution of authority.
The same question returned through data in the session organised by the European Citizen Science Association around participatory research infrastructures. The discussion of trust, legitimacy and accountability in citizen-generated data made clear that data is not a neutral foundation for decision-making. D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) show that decisions about whose data is collected, by whom and under which categories are already distributions of power.
In transport, this becomes tangible. Sánchez de Madariaga (2013) shows how mobility of care — chained, off-peak and multi-purpose trips, disproportionately undertaken by women — can remain invisible in models built around the commute. Hanson (2010) similarly shows that mobility and gender are mutually constitutive. If these movements are absent from the data, they are also less likely to shape regional decisions, making the representation of the region itself incomplete.
This also complicates participation. Arnstein (1969) reminds us that participation without redistributed power can become ritual, while Fung (2006) shows that participatory design must respond to context. At the regional scale, the functional city-region rarely coincides with an identifiable demos (Lidström & Schaap, 2018), creating the accountability tensions described by Swyngedouw (2005). Sørensen and Torfing’s (2005) idea of democratic anchorage therefore provides a useful test: participation matters when there are institutional pathways through which knowledge can affect decisions.
By the end of the conference, these discussions had converged around infrastructure. Addie, Glass and Nelles (2020) argue that infrastructure does not simply operate within a pre-existing region but helps produce it; Easterling (2014) shows how it can exercise power through its configuration and disposition. Corridors, financing systems and data infrastructures therefore do more than support regional development. They help determine what the region is, what becomes visible within it and whose needs are prioritised.
This is why equity cannot be added at the end through consultation or social mitigation. It has to enter the design of the systems themselves. The broader lesson I take from the conference, and from my first experience engaging with the RSA community, is that equity is not a correction to regional development; it is a design specification. It concerns not only who participates, but who defines the problem, whose knowledge becomes evidence, which impacts become visible, how costs and benefits are distributed, and who ultimately has the authority to shape the future of a region.
Thanks to the Regional Studies Association for the bursary that made this participation possible.
Sessions attended
- Decolonial Perspectives on Public Administration and Policy
- Local and Regional Responses for Sustainable Transitions 2: Climate Governance
- Spotlight Session — Regions in Evolution: A History of Regional Planning
- User Needs and Governance Scenarios for Participatory Research Infrastructures
References
Addie, J.-P. D., Glass, M. R., & Nelles, J. (2020). Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: A research agenda. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 7(1), 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2019.1701543
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225
Arora-Jonsson, S. (2011). Virtue and vulnerability: Discourses on women, gender and climate change. Global Environmental Change, 21(2), 744–751. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.01.005
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.
Fung, A. (2006). Varieties of participation in complex governance. Public Administration Review, 66(s1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2006.00667.x
Galland, D., Tewdwr-Jones, M., & Harrison, J. (2026). Regions in evolution: A history of regional planning. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003190608
Hanson, S. (2010). Gender and mobility: New approaches for informing sustainability. Gender, Place & Culture, 17(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690903498225
Head, B. W., & Alford, J. (2015). Wicked problems: Implications for public policy and management. Administration & Society, 47(6), 711–739. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399713481601
Lidström, A., & Schaap, L. (2018). The citizen in city-regions: Patterns and variations. Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2017.1355668
Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
Roy, A. (2009). The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory. Regional Studies, 43(6), 819–830. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343400701809665
Sánchez de Madariaga, I. (2013). Mobility of care: Introducing new concepts in urban transport. In I. Sánchez de Madariaga & M. Roberts (Eds.), Fair shared cities: The impact of gender planning in Europe (Chap. 4). Ashgate/Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315581835-4
Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2005). The democratic anchorage of governance networks. Scandinavian Political Studies, 28(3), 195–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2005.00129.x
Sultana, F. (2014). Gendering climate change: Geographical insights. The Professional Geographer, 66(3), 372–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2013.821730
Swyngedouw, E. (2005). Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state. Urban Studies, 42(11), 1991–2006. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500279869
About the author
María Camila Flórez Muñoz is a political scientist and Adjunct Lecturer at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia, where she also earned her Master’s in Government and Public Policy. Her work spans climate governance, sustainable urban development, and inclusive infrastructure, with a focus on collaborative decision-making in the Global South. She has led applied research and advisory projects on climate action, territorial planning, and urban mobility, bridging research and policy practice.