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Cornwall's Devolution Deal: Towards a More Sustainable Governance?
Author(s) -
Willett Joanie
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/1467-923x.12284
Subject(s) - devolution (biology) , corporate governance , sustainability , public administration , power (physics) , political science , civil society , environmental planning , sustainable development , sociology , economics , geography , law , management , ecology , physics , quantum mechanics , politics , anthropology , biology , human evolution
This article considers the devolution deal signed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in the summer of 2015. It asks if the deal constitutes a more sustainable approach to governance, concluding that while there are some factors that help to enhance sustainability, other areas urgently require more attention. These claims are made through an analysis of a model of sustainability which emphasises the importance of networks and feedback loops envisaging civil society as an adaptive organism. This helps to show that although power is significantly dispersed in some aspects of the ‘Cornwall Deal’, this latter does little to alter the highly centralised nature of governance across England, or provide spaces where local actors can feed back into central policy.