Devolved responsibility: English regional creative industries policy and local industrial strategies

The potential for cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to support national economic growth was first identified by the UK mapping report (DCMS, Creative industries mapping document. HMSO, 1998) and recently reiterated in a “sector deal” for creative industries (Bazalgette, Independent review of the creative industries. Department for Media, Culture and Sport, September 22. www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-the-creative-industries, 2017) accompanying the UK’s Industrial Strategy (BEIS, Industrial strategy: Building a Britain fit for the future. Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, November 27. Accessible via www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-building-a-britain-fit-for-the-future, 2017). This chapter explores the role of these narratives of CCI policymaking within two city-regional Local Industrial Strategy (LIS) pilots in the West Midlands and the North West of England. Using discourse analysis of LIS pilots, it compares their social practices and discourses which reveal “the local”, the rhetoric of creativity and the boundary work (Lamont & Molnár, The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195. https://doi-org.manchester.idm.oclc.org/10.1146/annurevsoc.28.110601.141107, 2002) within policy processes. It finds evidence of contractual relationships between the national and the local, and, following Paasi (Regional geography in 2020. In A. Kobayashi (Ed.), International encyclopedia of human geography. Elsevier, 2020), discursive practices and social interactions that mark out borders of these city-regions, revealing the agency of place within centrally driven policy instruments designed to support economic growth at a sub-national level.