Regional governance and the challenge of managing socio- economic change

The primary purpose of the chapter is to examine the position of Dublin in a set of widely shared and influential ideas about the emergence of a new urban era in developed economies, and on the particular governance challenges facing Dublin. The chapter itself is broken into six parts. The fist provides a brief introduction to the concept of a ‘New Conventional Wisdom’ (Gordon and Buck 2005: 5) about cities and city regions1 and the impact of this new paradigm on public policy discourse (section 2).2 This is followed by a short review of three key components of the New Conventional Wisdom: competitiveness and competition (section 3), social cohesion (section 4), and urban governance (section 5). Section 6 examines the situation of Dublin within the New Conventional Wisdom paradigm. The final part discusses the potential governance arrangements for Dublin as a consolidating city-region in what is, and is likely to remain, a very open economy (Smith, 2005: 150)