State Rescaling in Question: Analyzing National and Territorial State Capacity to Govern Local Economic Development

Marxist’s analysis on capitalism restructuring largely contributed to highlight the processes of rescaling of the State. This process produced a variety of local and national configurations in Europe (Keating, 2013). This said, according to Pasquier, regional and metropolitan spaces are not simply the réceptacles of macro economic trends, but also collective actors able to develop political strategy (Pasquier, 2015), and, this is the hypothesis to be explored in the paper, a different capacity to govern economic development. In this paper, we aim to pursue this theoretical and analytical perspective, by comparing the different capacity of “territorial” i.e. local and regional governments, and national State to govern territorial economic development. We will focus in particular on innovation and cluster policies by comparing two cases studies of regional and metropolitan governments (Rhône-Alpes/Lyon and Lombardy/Milan), on a time horizon of 20 years (1995-2015). Particular attention will be paid to the types of actors engaged in economic regulation, both public and private, and their mutual relationships. At the same time, we will also investigate the role played by national States in regional economies, assessed through the analysis of national public policies and institutional incentives and constraints. This analysis will allow us to tackle the broader question of State restructuring. We aim to refine the literature on the VoC (Variaties of Capitalism) by putting forward the interest to adopt a meso-perspective, analysing sector and territorial variations of State capacity to govern the economy (Trigilia, Burroni, 2009; Schröder, Voelzkow, 2014).