Multi-level governance and peripheral places: The North-East of England

Abstract

Stein Rokkan’s analysis of centres and peripheries is applied to the case of North-East England, the country’s most peripheral region. The North-East’s ability to represent its needs and wishes to the central government and the European Union has been hampered by the instability of its local and regional institutions, which have been repeatedly changed at the behest of successive sovereign central governments and became increasingly matters of political contention after 1979. This demonstrates that Rokkan’s analysis of peripheries as ‘distant, different and dependent’ is fully confirmed by this case study.