Multi-level deal-making: challenges and opportunities for Scottish city regions

Deal-making is becoming an increasingly popular way to coordinate policy implementation between the local and central level. The analysis of the design and implementation of City Region Deals in Scotland provides a unique insight into some of the challenges and opportunities which this type of mechanism encounters. This chapter focuses on the multi-level tensions between the local, regional and central levels of government in relation to the development process and implementation of City Region Deals. It frames the analysis along four interrelated dimensions: polity, policy, programming and politics. Although City Region Deals are a policy framework that was initiated by the UK Government, the Scottish Government has had a significant influence on the way the deals are designed and implemented in Scotland. From a bottom-up perspective, deal-making has offered Scottish local authorities considerable political leverage to extract resources and support from both the UK and the Scottish governments. At the same time, deal-making within a multi-level environment has presented local authorities with considerable capacity challenges, and although the deal-making rationale has originated from a place-based understanding of urban economic development—culminating in highly technical agreements that are bureaucratically led—the chapter demonstrates that political expediency remains a key factor in the design of the deals.