EU has empowered, as well as disempowered, regions and sub-national governments.
Secondly, ... regions have adapted to the EU opportunity structure.
Finally, ... regions and sub-national governments have also influenced the EU opportunity structure.
The EU framework provided UK regions and administrations with a comprehensive space in which interactions with the EU could represent specific UK regional interests. It allowed bypassing the centrality of the UK government, taking into account that opportunities and constraints are differential and interest- and strategy-specific; that material and ideational factors interact in territorial and sub-national authorities’ responses; and that actors and policy networks themselves can transform opportunity structures.
Brexit has removed this dynamic framework and it has placed a new emphasis not on the constant interplay of structure and strategy, but rather on a separation between them in producing specific outcomes. Questions about where control and sovereignty lie within the UK itself have thus far remained unanswered. The future will depend on three factors:
- the scale of the ‘external’ economic and political shock caused by Brexit;
- how resilient the regional administrations and their local economies are to those shocks;
- and how quickly regional and local economies will be able to shape and influence new opportunities structure coming from within the Union – if there are any.
European Urban and Regional Studies. 2021;28(1):34-39.