New forms of regional industrial policy in Europe: how do policy makers understand ‘competitiveness’ and ‘clusters’?

The last decade has seen a revival of regional industrial policy in the Western world. New policies have been built on recent insights into the drivers of competitive advantage, and are characterised by a focus on local production systems, on networking and partnerships, and more strategic forms of policy intervention. In addition, policy formulation and implementation has generally become part of an interactive process of consultation and consensus building, and, to a large extent, involves the co-ordination and reshaping of existing instruments rather than the development of entirely new ones. This paper will discuss the emergence of new forms of industrial policy targeted on regional ‘competitiveness ’ based on case studies undertaken in Germany, the UK and Spain. The aim of the paper is to understand how the concept and understanding of ‘competitiveness ’ by local policy makers and other actors has influenced the shaping of local industrial policy. Since all the case studies involve laggard regions, one of the key issues of debate is how policy makers perceive the balance between more indigenous, innovation-oriented approaches and approaches targeted on foreign investments. To understand the different outcomes in the various regions, account is taken of the governance framework for industrial policy making and implementation, the concepts and models invoked and used by policy makers, the impact of external factors such as funding conditions and European programmes and, most fundamentally, the industrial and political traditions which characterise each region. The present paper contains some preliminary results, and will focus primarily on the use of ‘cluster ’ concept in the various regions