Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning

Professor Kevin Morgan

This page provides more detailed information on research interests, projects and texts which aim to highlight some topical issues with which Kevin is engaged in here in CPLAN.

Research Interests

Over the past decade my research interests have invariably revolved around various permutations of the following themes:

Innovation and Regional Development
My interest in innovation studies began when I was a research fellow at Sussex University in the 1980s: initially in the School of Social Sciences, where I worked with Andrew Sayer and Alan Cawson, and later at the Science Policy Research Unit, where I worked with Robin Mansell and Ian Miles and where we were all inspired by the ideas and integrity of Chris Freeman, SPRU's founding director. But it was not until I came to Cardiff, in 1989, that I got the opportunity to explore the spatial dimensions of innovation. Most of my early research in this field was pursued jointly with Phil Cooke, and the main output of this work appeared in 1998 as The Associational Economy: Firms, Regions and Innovation (Oxford University Press, reprinted in paperback in 2000). At the heart of this book was our firmly held belief that innovation - in firms, regions or countries - is a collective social endeavour rather than a product of heroic individuals. Drawing on the insights of evolutionary political economy (which stresses the significance of uncertainty, bounded rationality, habits and routines and social capital) we sought to show that the regional level was assuming more importance for the design and delivery of innovation policy in the European Union. But we also argued that unilateral action at the regional level was not sufficient because less favoured regions needed the support of national and supra-national authorities to complement regional action.

With the proliferation of regional innovation strategies throughout the EU, and most recently in each of the English regions, I've become particularly interested in two specific questions. First, why do some regions find it easier than others to craft the institutional networks which are essential to the success of these regional innovation exercises? Second, what constitutes success? That is to say what indicators should we use to judge whether these regional innovation strategies are yielding any tangible benefits? Some of these questions informed the book I edited with Claire Nauwelaers (Regional Innovation Strategies: The Challenge for Less Favoured Regions, Routledge, 1999), a book we deliberately addressed to the policy and practice communities because innovation policy was such a novelty at the time.

To sum up, my interests in this field cover theoretical and policy-related questions and I have tried to address both dimensions in a paper called The Exaggerated Death of Geography: Learning, Proximity and Territorial Innovation Systems, a paper commissioned by the Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies (see section on recent publications). Among other things this paper explores the relative claims of physical and virtual proximity in a digital world and concludes by arguing that reports of the 'death of geography' are greatly exaggerated.

Devolution and the Multi-Level Polity
My interest in democratic devolution (as opposed to the more restrictive form of administrative devolution) grew out of my work on regional development in the EU. As we explored the vast array of institutional arrangements which made up 'the regional milieu' in Europe it became clear that the capacity to design and deliver one's own strategy, and the ability to act on locally acquired knowledge without having to secure permission from remote and often indifferent central government departments, was a potential institutional asset for regional economic development. Devolution, in this view, could have a democratising as well as developmental impact: politically, it can help to broaden and deepen democratic structures by creating new democratic spaces in otherwise centralised states; and it has the potential to make a positive contribution to development to the extent that it genuinely empowers local knowledge. It is for these reasons that I take a particular interest in the principle of subsidiarity (that is, the decentralisation of power to the lowest level that can execute it effectively).

I have sought to address these issues through public campaigns and through my publications. On the campaign front I was the chairperson of YES FOR WALES, the pro-devolution campaign in the 1997 Welsh referendum. On the publications front the most direct exploration of the promise and the practice of democratic devolution is the book Redesigning Democracy: The Making of the Welsh Assembly (see recent publications).

In my recent work I have tried to explore the tensions between subsidiarity and solidarity (the age-old tension between democracy and equality in other words) because devolution creates threats as well as opportunities. Without solidarity societies would degenerate into an autarchy of the rich. Without subsidiarity they would mutate into centralised, remote and impervious bureaucracies. In my view these two principles - solidarity and subsidiarity - are equally essential for a civilised society. Hence the dilemma is not to choose between them but, rather, to design robust governance mechanisms which allow us to resolve the tensions which are inevitably generated when they have parity of esteem.

These tensions are especially acute in the context of a multi-level polity like the European Union, where there are at least four levels of governance: local, regional, national and supra-national. As I argued in my Wilton Park report (A Europe of the Regions? The Multi-Level Polity and Subsidiarity in the EU), a multi-level polity raises pressing questions about how one secures social and spatial justice and about how one resolves inter-jurisdictional disputes because it seems tailor-made for passing the buck: each level is keen to claim the credit for success and each is equally keen to disclaim responsibility for failure. The old adage captures it perfectly: success has many parents but failure is an orphan. I hope to address the prospects for subsidiarity-with-solidarity in more depth in the near future.

Sustainable Agri-Food Chains
My interest in sustainable agri-food chains developed from two very different sources: first, from family concerns about the safety and nutritional value of industrialised food and, second, from the stimulating work of my departmental colleagues, principally Terry Marsden, Jonathan Murdoch and Mara Miele. Through these personal and professional influences I am belatedly beginning to understand that food - like water and waste - inadvertently reveals a lot about a society. The ways in which food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed have moved centre-stage in the inter-connected debates about democracy, development and wellbeing in the world today: the right to know what chemicals we are consuming with our food requires more robust food labelling regulations; shorter and more localised food chains could offer new development opportunities to crisis-ridden rural areas; and the link between food quality and human well-being needs to be better understood, especially in areas like the South Wales Valleys and Greater Glasgow, where we see some of the worst health records in the European Union.

My academic involvement in agri-food studies began in the mid-1990s when my departmental colleagues and I organised an international conference in Cardiff around the theme of Sustainable Food Chains and Regional Development, an event which attracted a great deal of interest from policy-makers, practitioners and academics. Following this event we secured funds (from a consortium which included the Welsh Office, the WDA and West Wales TEC) for a project called Organic Food Chains in Wales, an exploratory study of the organic food chain from farm to fork. This formed the basis of our ESRC project on quality issues in the food chain (see section below on recent research projects).

Animated by a concern for sustainable regional development we plan to explore the potential for shorter, more localised agri-food chains. For example, we were particularly interested in the fate of the Powys Food Links project, one of the aims of which was to get wholesome local food into local hospitals. This unpretentious aim was blocked by a whole series of regulatory hurdles - including EU directives, so-called Best Value regulations on local authorities and the narrow auditing conventions in health authorities to name but three. This seems a perverse outcome when the powers that be in Brussels, London and Cardiff all claim to be actively committed to sustainable development.

In May 2002, the Department of City and Regional Planning hosted an EU conference which explored the potential for new forms of rural development (including sustainable agri-food chains) in the context of the mid-term review of the Common Agricultural Policy, a regime which is slowly but surely becoming more nationally and regionally differentiated. The reform of the CAP could create a more supportive regulatory framework for small, high quality agri-food producers, especially organic producers, who are unable and unwilling to embrace the conventions of industrialised food production.

Regeneration and Self-Managed Communities
Ever since I arrived back in Wales in 1989 I have been consistently struck by the stubbornly high levels of social and economic deprivation in the South Wales Valleys (not that Brighton or Cardiff are without their chronically deprived areas). But coming from Rhigos, in the Cynon Valley, I have a strong personal interest in the fate of these communities, hence my involvement with communities like Penrhys. The noxious cocktail of deprivation, and what is to be done about it, ebbs and flows in Welsh politics. One of the biggest debates held on the subject over the past decade was held in Neath in 1992, organised by Peter Hain, the local MP, in association with the social democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation of Germany. To stimulate the debate Peter Hain asked me to prepare a report, which subsequently appeared as Rebuilding Our Communities: A New Agenda For The Valleys (Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 1992), a report which I co-authored with Adam Price. The problems we identified over ten years ago - social, economic, environmental, political, cultural and cognitive - appear to be as bad today as they were then.

In recent years politicians and policy-makers have begun to accept that past policies have not worked. Part of the reason for past failures - aside from lack of resources - is that the design and delivery of regeneration policy rarely acknowledged or tapped local knowledge in the targeted communities, hence community involvement was marginal at best. Today's regeneration policies certainly contain all the right rhetoric - partnership working, bottom-up strategy, capacity-building, local ownership etc - but this rhetoric often conceals as much as it reveals and robust evidence-based policy evaluation can shed light on this issue.

One of the main reasons why the Regeneration Institute was created was to promote more robust evidence-based policy evaluation, a goal we try to achieve by working in close partnership with communities themselves - be they local authorities, development trusts, community enterprises or small community groups. For my own part I am particularly interested in the 'citizen's science' approach to regeneration, where local people are directly involved in selecting the indicators and in collecting the data which will ascertain whether a project has enhanced the sense of well-being in a community. This approach, pioneered by the New Economics Foundation, helps to break down the debilitating barriers between regeneration professionals and the communities which are the 'targets' of regeneration programmes. This is an important part of the process which interests me most of all - namely the learning-by-doing process through which communities learn to become self-managing communities. Arguably, this could be conceived as the ultimate form of devolution, a form of civic devolution, in which communities assume more responsibility for governing themselves.

Of course the danger here is that governments, central and local, might be tempted to view this process as a means of abdicating responsibility for the plight of problematical or deprived communities. All the more reason, then, for communities which wish to explore the self-managing road to ensure that their powers and resources are equal to their newly devolved responsibilities. Self-managing communities will need access to funds, training and a wide array of expertise and I like to think that universities can begin to play a more benign role in supporting such communities than they have in the past. Certainly this is the hope of researchers associated with the Regeneration Institute.

Recent Research Projects

The Welsh Assembly and the Governance of Economic Development
Supported by the ESRC (Award Reference No. L327253029) under its first devolution programme this project was conducted jointly with Professor Gareth Rees, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, and Dr Robert Huggins. The chief aim of the project was to examine the transition from administrative to democratic devolution in Wales so as to assess the implications for the governance of economic development, especially with respect to the novel relationship between the National Assembly and the Welsh Development Agency. Some of the main results of this project were published as Learning By Doing: Devolution and the Governance of Economic Development in Wales, in P. Chaney et al (eds) New Governance, New Democracy? (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2001). The end of award report was delivered to the ESRC in July 2000.

Innovation and Quality in the Food Chain: Strengthening the Regional Dimension
Supported by the ESRC (Award Reference No. R000222843) this project was conducted jointly with Professor Jonathan Murdoch, Professor Terry Marsden and Nick Parrott. The starting point for this project was a recognition that the context surrounding food production and consumption was changing in a number of profound ways, not least the shift from an overriding concern for the quantity of food produced to a new concern for the quality of food products. One particular aspect of the new consumption context we thought needed urgent attention was the relationship between quality food and geographical provenance. It is becoming increasingly clear that consumers tend to place great trust in products that display strong attachments to place. This shift appears to open up a number of possibilities for those agri-food regions that have traditionally 'lagged behind' the more dynamic, high output agricultural areas. Choosing Wales as our case study, we sought to identify how new linkages might be established between producers, processors and consumers, as well as among producers, who need to develop more robust forms of collaboration if they are to raise their bargaining power via-a-vis multiple retailers. These were some of the key issues addressed in this project and the end of award report was delivered to the ESRC on 31 January 2001.

Steel Communities Study: Implications for Employment, Learning and Regeneration
Jointly sponsored by the National Assembly, Education and Learning Wales (ELWa) and the WDA, this project was designed to evaluate the individual and community effects of the large scale job losses associated with the Corus restructuring. The project was managed jointly with Professor Peter Fairbrother, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University and involved more than 20 researchers under the auspices of the Cardiff University Regeneration Institute, which is a joint venture between the Department of City and Regional Planning and the School of Social Sciences. The project identified wide-ranging effects of the redundancy programme, covering the social, economic, health, education, environmental, transport, planning and housing fields. Equally important it highlighted the scope for, and the limits to, integrated area-based regeneration policies - or what is sometimes referred to as 'joined-up' policy. The three volume report, which carries the same name as the project, was delivered to the National Assembly in July 2001, and it was published in full in September 2001. Copies of the full report can be obtained from Shelagh Lloyd at the Regeneration Institute (LloydS10@cardiff.ac.uk).

Social Innovation, Governance and Community Building
Financed under the EU's Fifth Framework Programme, this three year project began in September 2001 and is being conducted jointly with Huw Thomas and Liz Court. In total the project involves case studies of the social economy of nine cities in six EU countries, namely Antwerp, Brussels, Cardiff, Newcastle, Berlin, Lille, Vienna, Milan and Naples. The project primarily aims to examine integrated area development actions and social economy initiatives in selected neighbourhoods of the above cities. In particular it aims to improve our understanding of the relationship between civil society and neighbourhood development. It also aims to develop policy recommendations which will help to empower local communities in their search for more democratic and more sustainable forms of social and economic development.

Public Procurement and Local Food Chains
Sponsored by the Food Directorate of the Welsh Development Agency, this project was designed to explore the potential of local sourcing in the context of EU public procurement regulation. The latter regulations are often interpreted to mean that there is little or no scope for local action. This appears to be a very conservative, and counterproductive, interpretation because many innovative regions, especially in France and Italy, are already practicing local sourcing, especially for schools meals. The project aims to demonstrate the role which creative public procurement can play in promoting local food chains, an important component of sustainable development.

Going Local? Regional Innovation Strategies and the New Agri-Food Paradigm
The research project aims to produce a critical assessment of the prospects for local and organic food chains in the light of the Curry report (on the future of farming and food) which extolled these novel food chains as one of the greatest opportunities for farmers and producers in the UK to add value and retain a greater slice of the retail price. To examine this claim the research looks at these novel food chains in two different regulatory contexts: (1) the macro regulatory context of CAP reform and (2) the regional context in which these local systems are being promoted by regional development agencies and other bodies. The research uses three regional case studies: Wales and South West England, where this is a relatively new regional strategy, and Tuscany, which is one of the most innovative regions in the EU in producing and promoting local and organic food products.

Topical Issues

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