Subnational government internationalization and the global economy
Description
In the global competition for resources, why do some subnational governments establish international offices to spur their economic development while others do not? This dissertation adopts a mixed-method approach to examine the process of subnational government internationalization (SGI) – that is, the establishment of subnational international offices for economic development purposes – and how the combined forces of globalization and decentralization encourage subnational units to build new institutions and participate in the global market. I first rely on a statistical analysis of my original dataset, which tracks international activities of all 394 subnational governments within the OECD. I supplement these findings using interview and archival evidence to build a comparison between four subnational cases across Canada and the United Kingdom. My approach differs from past qualitative studies in the sub-filed by selecting both positive and negative cases of SGI. As a result, I focus on Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada, as well as Wales and the North East in the United Kingdom, highlighting the drivers that both spur and halt the growth of subnational international networks. I find a close link between subnational internationalization and subnational capacity. More specifically, I produce new and replicable results about the importance of subnational economy, geography, and political partisanship on the implementation of SGI. Wealthier subnational governments that are located closer to major international hubs are much more likely to establish international offices. Moreover, partisanship differences at the national and subnational level further this internationalization. The system of government, meanwhile, changes the relative importance of these capacity drivers; in federal systems, paradiplomacy is driven by economic capacity, while in unitary systems it is largely a result of political variables. These findings help us understand not only the growing role of subnational governments in international economic development but also raise interesting questions about the current underrepresentation of subnational institutions in the International Political Economy discourse overall. My research thus contributes to larger neo-liberal debates that reinterrogate the traditional role of nation-states in the economy, calling attention to the growing role of subnational governments in regional economic development initiatives.