Neighbourhood Policymaking and Political Discourses of Exclusion, Risk and Effect: An Interpretive Policy Analysis of the Evolution of Place-Based Programs in the UK and Canada

The impact of various forms of neighbourhood change on the social fabric of metropolitan areas is a major concern throughout affluent Western nations. In addressing spatially-concentrated problems, urban policy-making and development patterns have become increasingly similar across the advanced capitalist countries. There is a transnational movement among policy-makers toward the application of geographically targeted, neighbourhood-based interventions referred to as area-based, or place-based policies. In cities across Western Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada, we see the emergence of a new policy language: new policy frames, or storylines, which function to discursively construct the individuals and communities that reside in technocratically-defined ‘disadvantaged’, ‘priority’ or ‘at-risk’ neighbourhoods. Asking the question ‘why do certain ideas catch on in public policy’, this dissertation utilizes interpretive policy analysis (IPA) to understand how policy actors go about adopting transnational policy language, ideas and concepts – and how they enact them in their local contexts. This dissertation is focused on place-based policies and programs in the United Kingdom (UK) and Canada. Divided into three stand-alone papers, the dissertation explores three different but conceptually analogous topics. In doing so, it outlines the geographical and ideological origins of a place-based approach to local governance, and the means through which it has been established in local systems of governance. In the absence of scholarly research on ‘how, why, where and with what effects’ place-based policies have been circulated, learned, reformulated, and mobilized, this dissertation seeks to develop an understanding of the adaptations in the modalities and rhetoric of political actors, institutions and policy regimes which have accompanied the enactment of place-based policies at various scales of governance. IPA links ‘high’ politics (i.e., elite political institutions and multinational organizations) with ‘low’ politics (i.e., local and community-level governance). It orders and relates discursive elements (subjects, objects, tropes, narratives) to processes of meaning-making, representation and action. The IPA approach is used here to help account for the assemblage of policies, political discourses and regulatory tools that have produced new, place-based logics of 'social exclusion', 'risk' and 'neighbourhood effects' that are now widely understood as universal aspects of cities.Ph.D