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Framing neoliberal urbanism: Translating 'commonsense' urban policy across the OECD
zone
Nik Theodore and Jamie Peck
European Urban and Regional Studies 2012 19: 20 originally published online 19 December 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0969776411428500

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428500
2011
EUR19110.1177/0969776411428500Theodore and PeckEuropean Urban and Regional Studies

European Urban
and Regional
Article Studies

European Urban and Regional Studies

Framing neoliberal urbanism: 19(1) 2041

The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
Translating commonsense urban sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0969776411428500

policy across the OECD zone eur.sagepub.com

Nik Theodore
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Jamie Peck
University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract
The paper explores the evolution of urban policy discourses among advanced industrial nations in the period since the
early 1980s, by way of a case study of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The
OECD, it is argued, has provided an arena for the consolidation of a particular form of neoliberal urbanism, conceived
here as a mutating policy frame. As a consensus-finding organization, the OECD is more of a mediator than a unilateral
driver of policy conventions. It is not a site of hard-edged or radical policy innovation, but seeks to define a common
ground in the form of a positive policy consensus. As such, the OECDs coordinative discourse both reflects and
refracts a particular reading of the soft center of the urban policy consensus, revealing how (far) this has moved since
the early 1980s. Hardly preordained, this transnational mode of neoliberal urbanism has been a constructed project,
subject to significant adaption and evolution.

Keywords
OECD, policy mobilities, policy transfer, transnational governance, urban policy

Introduction: arenas of neoliberal

urbanism
The neoliberal turn in urban policy which has can likewise give license to loosely specified
been marked by the proliferation of various forms invocations of neoliberalism as the ultimate source
of state-mediated market rule, by privatized and of an allegedly universal urban policy rationality,
contractualized governance, and by widespread and to exaggerated claims concerning the supposedly
subordination to competitive logics has apparently singular origins of neoliberalization (for instance,
been so extensive and far-reaching that, in many
accounts, the process of neoliberalization acquires
Corresponding author:
a transcendental, almost atmospheric quality.
Dr Nik Theodore, Director, Center for Urban Economic
Neoliberalism is apparently not only out there, but Development, University of Illinois at Chicago, 400 S. Peoria St,
practically everywhere, seeping into every pore of Suite 2100, M/C 345, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
urban political life. This condition of pervasiveness Email: theodore@uic.edu

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Theodore and Peck 21
as a malign form of Americanization), or its top down
imposition through the institutions of the Washington
consensus. Likewise, neoliberal urbanism may be
(mis)represented as an authorless, omnipresent, and
monolithic phenomenon, as some automatic, self-
actualizing feat. There are many problems associ-
ated with such renderings of neoliberalization as
a simple process of outward diffusion or downward
imposition, not the least of which is a failure to
account for the path-dependent and variable nature
of institutional change, for the uncertain (and often
contested) nature of neoliberal reform politics, for
the uneven and contradictory development of actu-
ally existing projects of neoliberalism (over time
and space), and for the open-ended, incomplete
character of the neoliberalization process. Critical
attention to these issues has yielded an understand-
ing of neoliberalization as a heterogeneous and
hybrid, multi-sited and multi-scalar, dialectical and
dialogic phenomenon (see Brenner et al., 2010b).
However, the challenge of demystifying neoliber-
alism is a continuing one, for which no single ana-
lytical strategy is likely to suffice. One response to
this challenge, advocated here, is to seek and in vari-
ous ways to expose and problematize the actually
existing character of different modalities and mani-
festations of neoliberalism, as a constructed project,
and to denaturalize neoliberal urbanism as a policy
paradigm by exploring its origins, its evolution, and
its variegated form. Of course, it can be difficult
analytically to see let alone see beyond extant
policy paradigms such as neoliberalism in real time,
by virtue of their very existence as policy paradigms,
as ways of interpreting and intervening in the social
world (Hall, 1993; Peck, 2011). It is all the more
important, then, to shed light on the means through
which such policy paradigms are produced and
propagated, since their existence cannot be simply
presumed, and does not spring, fully formed and
unmediated, from structural imperatives, but must
be empirically demonstrated.
As a contribution to the burgeoning literature on
neoliberal urbanism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002;
Leitner et al., 2007; Marcuse et al., 2009; Rossi
and Vanolo, 2011; Taan-Kok and Baeten, 2011), the
present paper problematizes one aspect of this
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transnational process the evolving, transnational
dialogue around cities and urban policy that has
taken place under the aegis of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
over the past three decades. The phrase transnational
dialogue is used advisedly here, since the OECD is
not so much a unilateral maker but a multilateral
mediator of policy, and it is not a comprehensively
global but a selectively transnational agency, which
establishes arenas for policy discussion and com-
promise among its membership of advanced indus-
trial nations.1 The OECD is not a global institution
per se, but is a transnational one, with a locus of
operations that centers on Europe but that also
extends into wealthy and middle-income countries
of the Americas and Asia. In this work, the OECD
must rely on persuasion, not sanction or even posi-
tive incentive, because it lacks the power to enforce
its policy recommendations. As such, the OECD
often reflects (or anticipates) the policy consensus of
its member nations, although it would be wrong to
see the organization as an institutional cipher or
passive player.
Although the OECD itself is rarely the unilateral
author of policy innovations, it does have an authori-
tative voice in international policy dialogues.
Alongside other international organizations, such as
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the World Trade Organization, the OECD
performs the important function of a transfer agent,
a disseminator of policy intelligence and a provider
of forward thinking on preferred policies and best
practices (Stone, 2004: 553; see also Mahon and
McBride, 2008). As a soft power institution, the
OECD works on the strategic selection and purpose-
ful circulation of policy norms (sometimes as prin-
ciples, sometimes as best practices) that at least in
embryo have already been articulated by some of its
member nations, handing these back for discursive
and practical ratification but conferring status and
legitimacy in the process. This does not reflect, nor
does it promise, some incipient policy consensus
across the membership of nations; rather, the OECD
negotiates across those differences that do exist
both politically and geographically while connect-
ing policy innovations and would-be norms across
22 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
disparate institutional sites and purpose-made net-
works. As such, its stated positions reflect a kind of
elite commonsense, rooted in the moving centers of
policymaking gravity across what is an uneven and
porous policy space, and one that may also leak into
wider international policy discourses, in the form of
expert claims, demonstrable norms, or best practices.
The OECD does not merely find, but helps
actively to construct, policy consensuses across a
range of fields, while seeking to move policy con-
versations in a positive direction. Yet, because it
cannot impose policy from above, the OECD must
operate as a deft, interstitial actor, utilizing tech-
niques such as mediation, meditation, peer pressure,
orchestration, evaluation, suasion, and exhortation
to move policy norms. In the context of neoliberal-
ization, this affords the OECD an intriguing, yet
curiously neglected, status: it does not display the
hard-edged vanguardism often associated with agen-
cies such as the World Bank, but instead occupies
what might be characterized as the soft center of
international policy orthodoxies. And the way in
which the OECD has found a role and a voice in
urban policy in particular what Neil Bradford
(2008) has portrayed as its local turn reveals a
great deal about the meandering, often prosaic path
of neoliberalization, its shifting rationales and
rationalities, and its accretive and experimental
form. This does not, we emphasize, represent a sin-
gular OECD model of neoliberalism or a coherent
Paris consensus, but calls attention to one of the
arenas in which transnational (urban) policy norms
are being debated, shaped, and consolidated.
As we will show, the neoliberalization of urban
policy, and the shifting ideological locus of the urban
policy consensus among the advanced industrial
nations, was not a matter of once-and-for-all regime
change. Rather, the recalibration of urban policy has
been incremental if cumulative, tracing a path of
contradictory normalization. This is therefore a story
more of uneven transformation than of clear-cut
transition, and it is one in which the policy space
defined and animated by the OECD has played a
distinctive (if not exactly driving) role. As we will
see, what Rianne Mahon (2011) refers to as the
coordinative discourses of the OECD describe an
untidy arc from a deeply politicized diagnosis of the
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urban crisis of the 1980s through to the construction,
over the period since the late 1990s, of a pragmati-
cally framed vision/version of transnational urban
policy open, experimental, and ostensibly post-
ideological at its purposefully nebulous core, but at
the same time quite tightly framed within neoliberal
parameters (see Bradford, 2008; Brenner et al.,
2010b). Here, neoliberalism defines the space of the
politically feasible, rather than fastening to a singular
policy template. The scope of OECD policy pre-
scriptions may reveal less about the cutting edges of
innovative practice and more about the soft disci-
pline of neoliberal constraints, such as competitive
resilience at the local scale, budgetary restraint,
task-oriented governance, and a preference for mar-
ket-enhancing over socially redistributive strategies.
The OECD is one space in which these frames
are realized and where they are adjusted over time
in accordance with changing circumstances and
reformulated goals.
The paper is divided into three parts. First, we
consider the mode of multilateral policymaking
in and around this agency of the Paris consensus,
drawing attention to its characteristically soft
forms of policy advocacy. Second, we explore the
changing ways in which the OECD has articulated
the far-reaching reframing of urban policy, based
on a close reading of the most prominent OECD
urban policy documents over the past three decades,
tracing shifting lines of argumentation regarding the
nature and remedies of urban problems and the role
of cities as sites of intervention. We will argue that
these documents simultaneously codify and legiti-
mate an evolving urban policy consensus, anointing
promising innovations while at the same time
providing direction. Occasionally by way of direct
critique, though more often through a more subtle
process of strategic prioritization and exclusion
(silencing), they reflect and shape received under-
standings of the spheres of politically acceptable
and pragmatically feasible policy development.
Methodologically, this empirical section of the
paper takes the form of a meta-analysis of policy dis-
courses, concerned to detect broad patternings,
silences and exclusions, and the gradual realignment
of diagnoses and prescriptions over time. Third, in
an extended concluding commentary, we return to
Theodore and Peck 23
more theoretical questions around the status and
form(s) of neoliberal urbanism. Here, we reflect on
some of the methodological and interpretative issues
raised by this approach. Substantively, we argue that
this account of the ascendancy of the OECD as a
transnational urban policymaker largely affirms
accounts of the growing influence of neoliberal
ideology across advanced industrial nations. At the
same time, the analysis also points to significant
shifts within the evolving paradigm of neoliberal
urbanism since the 1980s, underlining its character
as an essentially adaptive regime of market rule.
Transnational governance,
OECD-style
Urban policy was not considered within the remit of
the OECD during the first two decades of its exis-
tence, when the organizations principal concern as
an agent of Keynesian harmonization was macro-
economic policy. Reflecting its origins as a coordi-
nator of reconstruction programs under the Marshall
Plan after the Second World War, the OECD emerged
as a creature of the Keynesian consensus, with pri-
mary policy remits in the management of trade and
(national) economic development, tax harmoniza-
tion, and so on. The protracted crisis of the Keynesian
orthodoxy during the 1970s and 1980s, however, not
only marked the interregnum between policy para-
digms and the rise of neoliberalism, it also signaled
a far-reaching shift in the spatial and scalar constitu-
tion of the policymaking process (Peck, 2011). This
can be seen as the beginning of the end for the
tradition of relatively insulated, domestic policy-
making, as previously quite robust national boundar-
ies around policymaking practices and norms were
first breached before becoming increasingly porous
(Peck and Theodore, 2001; Jessop, 2002; Le Gals,
2002; McBride and Mahon, 2008; Simmons et al.,
2008; Roy, 2010). This has not led to a one-way pro-
cess of global convergence, or to an international
policy monoculture. What has changed, though, and
perhaps permanently, is the level of interpenetration
between (national) policymaking regimes and the
transnational circuits of policy development, which
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now connect and relativize policymaking across
jurisdictions in historically new ways. As Garrett
et al. (2008: 359) have argued, even after neoliberal-
ism itself is exhausted, these kinds of integration and
interpenetration between policymaking worlds will
be a continuing feature of an unevenly globalizing
political economy.
In the process, the arenas defined by the OECD
have assumed increased importance, as centers of
policy exchange and codification. And, reflecting
this, the OECD has gradually acquired an increas-
ingly broad-spectrum presence, beyond its core
concerns in (macro) economic policy, reaching into
fields such as public sector management, health-
care, and social, environmental, and urban policy.
Macroeconomic, trade, and labor market policy
defined the central ideological nexus around which
the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism was
contested within the ambit of the OECD a moment
of paradigmatic rupture and reorientation prefigured
by the McCracken Report of 1977 and progressing
through various iterations of the jobs strategy in sub-
sequent decades (McBride et al., 2008; Woodward,
2009; Mahon, 2011). Subsequently, relative distance
from the organizations core economic mandate has
apparently allowed for some recognition of diversity
of policy approaches in fields such as healthcare and
urban governance, where experimentation, dialogue,
and more incremental consensus-building have
been evident (McBride and Mahon, 2008: 280). So,
whereas economic and employment policy ultimately
became (and have since remained) staunchly neo-
liberal, often in the face of serial policy failure and
chronic underperformance (McBride et al., 2008:
165; see also Mahon, 2011), surveys of the evolution
of social and urban policy debates around the OECD
are more inclined to appeal to hybrid formulations
such as inclusive or innovatory (neo)liberalism
(Bradford, 2008; Mahon, 2008).
Whether such developments represent transfor-
mations beyond neoliberalism or the continuing
mutation of the neoliberalization process and its
always variegated forms is a salient point here, but
beyond the scope of the present paper (see Brenner
et al., 2010b; Peck et al., 2010). If neoliberalism is
taken to refer to a pure laissez faire approach, as
24 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
indeed it sometimes is in OECD documents (2006:
100), then of course this bears little resemblance to
contemporary policymaking practices. But if neolib-
eralization is regarded as a mongrel mode of gover-
nance, always involving (flawed) state action and
always interpenetrated with its others, then formula-
tions such as inclusive neoliberalism mark not
so much a break beyond neoliberalism as a new con-
figuration of an evolving process, and not so much a
singular fix as a problem space (Peck, 2010). It fol-
lows that the OECDs shifting membership spans
ideologically committed neoliberal administrations
(such as the US and the UK during the 1980s) and a
range of governments that might be characterized as
centrist and conservative administrations, and which
might pragmatically embrace or selectively contest
neoliberal positions, thereby shaping a hybrid zone
of neoliberal policymaking. The OECDs soft law
activities are fashioned to operate across this shifting
terrain, finding common ground and spaces of con-
sensus, in the process designating the nebulous soft
center of neoliberalization more than its hard edges.
All of this underlines the fact that the OECD is far
from a monolithic organization, issuing diktats and
speaking with one voice. Moreover, the prevailing pol-
icy positions that the organization reflects, refracts,
and refines have clearly evolved in significant ways
over time. In fact, the OECD might more appropri-
ately be considered an arena for socializing and
stabilizing quasi-consensual policy norms both of
which processes are continuous, incomplete, and
contradictory. Neither a development bank nor a
law-making body, the OECD operates as an ide-
ational arbitrator (Marcussen, 2004: 16) and as an
important source of transnational policy knowledge
construction and dissemination (Mahon, 2011: 1).
The OECDs gatekeeper function here is important
because the processes of learning from and dis-
seminating policy designs, instruments, and proto-
cols are inescapably partial and selective, although
very often purposive (Peck and Theodore, 2010).
International agencies such as the OECD deploy soft
power, as nodal points in transnational transfer
networks, constructing the foundations for, while
making the spaces for, the multilateral exchange
of policy ideas, with the goal of shaping common
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policy responses across their spheres of influence
(Stone, 2004: 5523; Porter and Webb, 2008).
These organizations shape policy debates in at
least three ways. First, they organize spaces for
dialogue and exchange among policy elites (for
example, developing shared analyses of prevailing
socioeconomic conditions), identifying correspond-
ing forms of best practice. The analyses and
prognoses provided by the OECD and its ilk can be
seen as part of an evolving meta-narrative of global
policy development. Beyond the advocacy of this or
that policy instrument, these organizations seek
to elaborate coherent rationales around favored
policies, to articulate their higher (or at least cross-
jurisdictional) logic and purpose, and to stimulate
momentum in the policymaking process in the
direction of strategic goals. As such, they routinely
construct rationales and frameworks around favored
bundles of policies, in the process both reflecting
and shaping the dominant policy paradigm.2 The
influence of international organizations, then, extends
well beyond the appropriateness of any particular set
of policy recommendations for any given national or
local context; these organizations shape the under-
standing of the very nature of policy problems and,
in the process, legitimate some options while fore-
closing and silencing others. They are engaged, in
other words, in the constrained projects of paradigm
building and maintenance.
Second, international organizations enable the
rapid dissemination of policy ideas. One of the ben-
efits of OECD study groups for member states,
for example, is that they create opportunities for
policymakers to quickly and selectively learn from
policy experiments carried out in other locales
that have been sanctioned by designated experts,
some of which will carry the credibility (not to say
legitimacy) of international best practices. The
OECDs ongoing roles in policy surveillance, evalu-
ation, peer review, and case study, and its recruit-
ment of academics, consultants, advocates, and
policy entrepreneurs from favored sites, are instru-
mental in establishing the preconditions for emula-
tive status as best practices or policy models. The
OECD, of course, does not create these practices
and models, but it has the authority to select (and to
Theodore and Peck 25
selectively evaluate) them, together with the power
and resources to place them into circulation, as pre-
approved, mobile policies (Peck and Theodore,
2010). The inclusion of a given policy approach in
OECD documents elevates the significance of the
policy beyond its local or national context, and it
suggests that emulation by other jurisdictions is
warranted. The OECD is therefore in the business of
moving favored policy innovations across jurisdic-
tions. It does so not in the naive expectation of policy
convergence (harmonization is the preferred, some-
what metaphorical, nomenclature) but in the hope of
achieving positive momentum in the direction of
preferred reforms. Periodically, breakthrough ideas
and guru-status advocates may energize this process,
but its more prosaic and ongoing function is to des-
ignate sound policies in anticipation of incremental
movement in that direction.
Third, international organizations such as the
OECD are well-resourced entities with extensive
capacities for policy research and evaluation, coupled
with an ability to reach deep into (indeed to constitute)
expert networks, not least in academia. They are
consequently among the foremost purveyors of
expert policy knowledge in the global domain,
producing analyses and recommendations that carry
the imprimatur not just of international authority but
of objective social science. Working within the
prevailing policy paradigm but pushing constantly
for normal science forms of incremental progress,
the weight beyond such policy prescriptions can
be formidable; indeed, the conclusions of research
studies and expert testimony are themselves impor-
tant means of building the kind of expert consensus
upon which the OECDs work is predicated. Expert
declarations and policy prescriptions are often cited
in uncritical and mutually referential ways within
OECD networks, which adds to the impression that
consensus has been reached and that policy debates
are firmly settled (Lal, 2001; Goldman, 2005; St Clair,
2006). This in turn tends to raise the perceived costs
(both economic and political) for policymakers who
choose to ignore or deviate from the prescriptions
offered. Meanwhile, the silencing occurs as much
through inaction as through action: those that are
not invited to join the high-level policy dialogue
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simply remain unheard; in effect, they are not rec-
ognized as experts.
In this context, the OECD is involved in processes
of policy diffusion along two dimensions, which can
be stylized as vertical and horizontal axes of influ-
ence. The vertical axis concerns the relations between
the organization and key decisionmakers and policy
advisors at the national and (increasingly) local
levels (Stone, 2004), which in this case is far from a
straightforward, hierarchical relationship. After all,
the OECD is a membership organization, which
must always be careful not to get too far ahead of its
members especially its most powerful members in
Europe and North America (see Ruckert, 2008). The
OECDs interactions with member countries can
be regarded as voluntary (though for exceptions, see
Lodge, 2005), and opportunities exist for greater
or lesser involvement in the organizations activities.
Certainly, the OECD can ill afford to become
embroiled in political disputes with (or between) its
members, or to allow dissenting potions to be left
unattended. Bound by commitments to good gover-
nance and best practice, it remains detached from
formal decisionmaking authority, and, although its
senior officials are acutely aware of the political
calculations and constraints facing member govern-
ments, every effort is made to keep these at arms
length. This is another reason why the OECD can
mobilize its soft power and coordinative capacities
only with a relatively light touch. (It also helps
explain the important, legitimating roles in the work
of the OECD played by scientific research, expert
testimony, conference-based deliberations, and
appeals to objective policy science.) In effect, the
organization works to gently shepherd policy actors,
even though it lacks ultimate control of the flock.
Turning to the horizontal axis, here the OECD
works to facilitate the exchange of policy ideas
among national and local decisionmakers and to
build networks around specific policy fields and proj-
ects. In practical terms, the organization serves as a
platform for disseminating policy advice on a range
of employment, education, environmental, economic
development, and public management topics. Its
principal mechanisms are those of issue prioritization
and positive inclusion, enrolling policy actors into
26 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
networks as purveyors of best practice and as
would-be shapers of new norms. (Again, this pas-
sively silences those absent from the high-level con-
ferences, the working parties, and the opt-in networks,
but it also enables a kind of selective consensus to
form around those progressing in a certain direction.)
Along with other expertised institutions (St Clair,
2006), the OECD occupies a unique position as a
center of influence and mediation across a range of
policy fields, its growing interest in urban and
territorial policies being a case in point. Competitive
Cities in the Global Economy, the OECDs most
ambitious foray into urban policy debates, for exam-
ple, is styled as a product of horizontal synthesis,
combining city case studies with extensive engage-
ment of national and local-level policy actors (OECD,
2006: 4, 11). The report, and the synthesis of policy
recommendations that followed several months later,
sought to cut a centrist path through contemporary
urban policy debates, acknowledging problems such
as social exclusion and environmental degradation,
but at the same time framing appropriate responses to
these in the context of the irreversible trend of global
economic integration, which is presented, in effect,
as a structural imperative (OECD, 2007: 1; see also
Bradford, 2008).
Similarly, deference to local knowledge and to
the wide range of local conditions is a recurring
theme in what amounts to an oblique form of policy
advocacy, issued with a light touch: Cases are
quoted, not because they serve as models to follow,
the report states, but because they illustrate themes
and provide examples; policymakers are exhorted
to find creative compromises that transcend (or
evade) awkward choices and difficult tradeoffs, it
being recognized that the actual paths chosen in
specific contexts will depend on political criteria, the
particular balance of issues at stake, and the creativ-
ity of individual groups of policy-makers (OECD,
2006: 80). To be above the fray, while at the same
time endorsing some strategic directions over others,
should not, however, be mistaken for an apolitical
position. In a sense, it is a manifestation of neoliber-
alism practiced as high politics (see Beck, 2000).
How did the OECD arrive at this position? The orga-
nizations evolving position in urban policy hardly
amounted to a quick fix. In fact, there has been more
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than a quarter-century of evolution in OECD
thinking on urban issues, to which we now turn.
There have been at least three phases in this evolu-
tion process of constructing a vision of transnational
urban governance, the origins of which lie with the
urban crises of the 1980s. We trace these in the
following section of the paper through an evolving
policy narrative, expressed through the synthetic
and strategic statements of the OECD and its expert
networks.
Transnationalizing urban governance
Narrating urban crisis: failures of
spatial Keynesianism
In recognition of the mounting social, economic, and
political upheavals experienced in cities across
Europe and North America, the OECD established
the Ad Hoc Group on Urban Problems in 1979. The
remit of the Ad Hoc Group was to convene experts
and senior policymakers from OECD member
countries to offer analysis and policy advice on the
problems facing cities and to issue a series of techni-
cal and policy reports to inform policymakers about
issues of common concern (OECD, 1983a: 3). The
Ad Hoc Group on Urban Problems (and its succes-
sor, the Group on Urban Affairs) was established as
a learning network motivated by two questions:
First, what can countries (and regions) anticipating
substantial urban growth in the 1980s learn from the
policies of their predecessors whose rapid growth
period is past? Second, for countries or regions that
are likely to experience slow overall urban growth,
how valid for the future are the policies [of the past,
especially] when the problems of adjusting to decline
become more widespread and politically visible?
(OECD, 1983a: 13). In other words, the Ad Hoc
Group on Urban Problems would serve as study
group, analyzing both the causes of urban problems
and the effectiveness of various strategic responses,
and it would be a repository for urban policy lessons
(including some hard ones) as the foundations for a
rational, deliberative process of policy learning.
This scientific terminology anticipated the expert
diagnoses and prescriptions that would follow.
Theodore and Peck 27
The OECDs analysis of the urban crisis of the early
1980s centered on the problems of urban decline
. . . defined as the spatial concentration in large
cities of social, economic and environmental prob-
lems such as high levels of unemployment and pov-
erty, housing deterioration and decay of the urban
infrastructure (OECD, 1983a: 52). The Ad Hoc
Groups assessment of the state of major city-regions
of Europe and North America was sobering, and it
reflected the widespread concern at the time that the
older industrial cities of OECD member countries
had encountered an unprecedented (and perhaps
terminal) period of decline. The dimensions of the
crisis, described in real time by the Ad Hoc Group,
were as follows:
high levels of unemployment, low-paid or
irregular employment, closure of factories,
shops and offices;
deteriorating housing conditions, the physical
decay of the built environment and infrastruc-
ture, vacant land and abandoned buildings;
severe social problems including low
educational achievement, isolated elderly
people, single-parent families, poverty and
homelessness;
concentrations of ethnic minorities, often
encountering discrimination in finding homes
and work; and
crime and vandalism, the occasional outbreak
of riots, and a general breakdown of law and
order (OECD, 1983a: 501).
Despite having largely ignored the urban as a poli-
cymaking domain until this time, it was the urban
manifestations of the macroeconomic crises of the
1970s that effectively pushed cities onto the agenda
of the OECD literally as an unavoidable policy
problem. This said, the initial response was (again
quite literally) an ad hoc one.
In terms of the analysis itself, three processes of
structural change were seen at the time to be driv-
ing urban decline: the internationalization of the
advanced economies (causing capital flight from
older industrial regions); substitution of capital for
labor (further undermining the employment situa-
tion, especially in the de-industrializing cities of
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Europe and North America); and service sector
growth (leading to declining incomes and worsen-
ing employment opportunities). Together, these
structural changes were seen to have led to a
decreased aggregate demand for labour that could
be exacerbated by business-cycle effects as well as
by corporate investment decisions. This was a
vision of cities as victims of structural economic
decline, and it was one that was still being inter-
preted in broadly Keynesian terms, such as demand
deficiency and national responsibility.
There is good reason to believe that the negative
effects of structural economic change, and particularly
unemployment, are likely to be disproportionately felt
in declining urban areas . . . Declining urban areas tend
to have concentrations of old and out-moded industrial
plants, if only because they were developed first. When
firms rationalise their activities it is these plants that are
likely to close first. Thus, older urban areas may lose
industrial employment through both net disinvestment
in industrialised countries as a whole, and through
capital substitution. Similarly, during cyclical down-
turns in national economies, firms may reduce output
not by reducing production at newer, more productive,
suburban plants but by closing older plants in inner
urban areas. (OECD, 1983a: 70)
There was not one whiff of new-economy optimism
in this diagnosis. Service sector growth was seen as
a decidedly mixed blessing, insufficient to offset
declines in the manufacturing base of older indus-
trial regions.
In general, the increase in service employment in the
majority of declining urban areas has not led to
improved job opportunities for residents of declining
areas, because of a mismatch between available skills
and those required in growth sectors of the economy.
While retraining is theoretically a solution, and there
may well be improved opportunities for clerical work
in inner areas, there are limits to what retraining might
achieve. The real problem is the decline in aggregate
labour demand . . . All these processes are likely to lead
to increasing levels of unemployment . . . and
decreasing levels of household income in many urban
areas . . . In short, rising unemployment may initiate a
self-perpetuating spiral of decline in certain urban
areas. (OECD, 1983a: 71, emphasis added)
28 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
This analysis, it should be noted, was quite signifi-
cantly out of step with the radically revised positions
of two of the OECDs most powerful members, the
US and the UK, which at the time were pursuing
active, neoliberal policies with ideological gusto
(Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Robertson, 1986).3
The Ad Hoc Groups assessment of the structural
factors that precipitated economic collapse in the
manufacturing centers of OECD member states was
essentially Keynesian. It deployed the language of
interventions, subsidies, welfare, and job creation.
The authors of the first report attributed localized
economic decline, rising unemployment, and civil
unrest to falling aggregate demand, and they
emphasized an activist role for the national state in
challenging both the causes and the consequences of
these problems. This was seen to require a two-
pronged strategy combining aspatial policies to
improve overall economic conditions and targeted
measures directed to areas of greatest need:
Economic and social processes affecting urban areas
operate nationally . . . There is an important role for
national OECD governments in attempting to combat
urban decline. Revitalization policies . . . could include
labour retraining and job creation programmes in the
economic sphere; income maintenance and rent
allowances or housing subsidies as part of welfare
policy; [and] revenue support to local authorities
suffering from declining tax bases. (OECD, 1983a: 74)
Circulating new solutions: re-diagnosing the
Because, on their own, aspatial policies will not be urban crisis
sufficient, the Ad Hoc Group called for a new
generation of area improvement initiatives, noting
that a sufficient concentration of funds in a particu-
lar area needing assistance is necessary to have
an impact (OECD, 1983a: 75, 79). A number of
specific programs received positive endorsement,
including neighborhood revitalization, public par-
ticipation, and social housing efforts in France,
Germany, the UK, and the US (OECD, 1983a: 79
80) and public works programs in Spain (OECD,
1983b: 84). More broadly, there was support for fis-
cal transfers from national governments to distressed
urban areas and for the approaches adopted by
Canada, France, and Norway, which were praised
for their deployment of industrial incentives with
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the deliberate purpose of trying to change the
industrial structure of depressed regions (OECD,
1983b: 85; see also OECD, 1986: ch. 9). The parlous
state of the cities was seen as a national responsibil-
ity, requiring a concerted, interventionist response.
Although the OECDs analyses of both the prob-
lems confronting economically distressed urban
areas and the policies that could be effective in
reversing economic decline were firmly based in
Keynesian economics and a portfolio of policies
relying on forms of spatial Keynesianism (Brenner,
2004; Martin and Sunley, 1997), the aim of which
was to ameliorate the uneven distribution of eco-
nomic development within national territories, even
by the early 1980s there was a discernable move in
the direction of development led by the private
sector and of market-oriented approaches to eco-
nomic revitalization. The Ad Hoc Group noted: In
the present economic climate . . . certain new trends
appear to be emerging, namely, a tendency to favour
incentives over regulation, tax inducements over
grants and the assignment of a more substantial role
to the private sector and market mechanisms
(OECD, 1983a: 12). However, what began as a shift
in preferred policy instruments would, over the
course of the decade, evolve into an alternative para-
digm of urban revitalization.4
During the 1990s, the OECD released several docu-
ments summarizing the state of urban policy analysis
and practice, particularly as they related to the prob-
lems facing distressed city-regions. The first, Cities
for the 21st Century was published following the
OECD International Conference on the Economic,
Social and Environmental Problems of Cities. This
1992 gathering of urban policymakers was convened
to explore two fundamental issues: what urban poli-
cies should be, and how those policies should be
developed and implemented (OECD, 1994: 7).
Acknowledging the diversity of opinions repre-
sented at the conference and the lack of unanimity
among delegates, the OECD was nevertheless able
to divine several broad areas of consensus (OECD,
Theodore and Peck 29
1994: 3). Some of the most symbolically loaded
features of this new-found consensus represented
much more than the adoption of new policy instru-
ments; rather, they were phase-shifts in both problem
diagnosis and political worldview.
Now, the failings of cities were being tagged to
the supposed failings of (certain) urban residents
and to the matrix of welfarist policies on which
they had allegedly become dependent. The 21st
Century report embraced one of the most conten-
tious social policy innovations of the 1980s, the
concept of the urban underclass, developed by con-
servative intellectuals in the US and propagated by
its increasingly powerful think tanks (Mead, 1992;
OConnor, 2008; Peck, 2010). This was reflected in
an awakened concern with (as opposed to for) the
new urban poor . . . [and] the complex conjunction
between the character of individuals and the imper-
sonal forces of the larger social and political order,
and the paradox of poverty in affluent societies
(OECD, 1994: 19). Whereas, in the 1980s, the
OECDs analysis of unemployment and poverty
focused squarely on economic problems of inad-
equate job opportunities arising from insufficient
aggregate demand, structural change, and disin-
vestment, policy documents produced during the
1990s promulgated an entirely different cause-and-
effect relationship between economic restructuring,
unemployment, and poverty, which was rooted
in supply-side rationalities. Significantly, the emer-
gence of an urban underclass is identified as a
generalized phenomenon in OECD member states,
beginning a process of substituting structural eco-
nomic explanations for cultural individual ones:
What matters most is that the underclass has become
self-perpetuating. The culture of the underclass, because
it reinforces cycles of deprivation and disadvantage,
takes on perhaps greater significance than questions
about the factors that caused the formation of an
underclass in the first place. . . . Given the strength of
those cultural patterns, economic and political initiatives
themselves appear inadequate to address the problem of
the underclass. (OECD, 1994: 20)
The late-Keynesian formulations of the 1980s
had traced social problems to underlying economic
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causes. By the early 1990s, however, social problems
were seen to be exacerbating economic problems,
and some were directly implicated in producing
new forms of urban poverty and exclusion.
Moreover, such was the entrenched nature of the
attendant cultural patterns, these were believed to
have effectively overridden economic causes of the
urban underclass phenomenon. On the other hand,
the role of macroeconomic forces in creating eco-
nomic polarization and long-term unemployment
was demoted to the parenthetic causal status of
inconclusive (OECD, 1998: 40). The challenge of
reintegrating the new urban poor, then, entailed
nothing less than the structural adjustment of
the poor themselves, along with the cultures of
low-income communities, since the culture of the
underclass . . . reinforces cycles of deprivation and
disadvantage (OECD, 1994: 20).
Rationales for paradigmatic breaks in thinking
and action permeate the documents themselves.
Thus, it was suggested that the emergence of the new
urban poor, whose behaviors and worldview cause
them to be the authors of their own marginalization,
required that policymakers take the bold step of
consider[ing] doing something new . . . [while
avoiding] counter-productive government policies
which create patterns of dependency (OECD, 1994:
19, 20; see also OECD, 1996). Now seen as coun-
ter-productive were those forms of Keynesian urban
policy that as recently as a decade earlier had been
staples of OECD policy advice.
Many post-war era policies have attained a disturbingly
low rate of effectiveness. Some of the solutions of the
1960s to the problems of earlier periods (public housing,
welfare assistance), have in turn become problems
on their own account, as illustrated by the perverse
incentives associated with welfare assistance, the
culture of poverty, and the environmental characteristics
of districts concentrating large percentages of poor
people. As with medicine, the least that one should
expect is that government intervention does not
aggravate the condition. (OECD, 1994: 19)
Paradoxically, although structural economic
causes were formally eschewed, economistic dis-
course was nevertheless deployed in assertions of
30 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
the (ostensibly non-negotiable) imperatives of
growth restoration and fiscal restraint. Welfare state
spending was likewise indicted as a counterproduc-
tive drag on economic growth and an obstacle
to both market flexibility and prudent budgeting.
Considerable taxes are collected to support welfare
payments, but they do not strictly contribute to
raising GDP [gross domestic product]. Nor do they
contribute to the national patrimony . . . Deregulation
notwithstanding, the soaring welfare bill is already
becoming a political bombshell (OECD, 1994:
645). Having failed the strict economic test of
contributions to domestic output, welfare payments
were also apparently failing the political test of public
tolerance.
With the wisdom, efficacy, and political viability
of welfarist approaches to poverty alleviation now
very much in question, the OECD moved on to
embrace another significant shift in (newly) extant
policy practice the move towards greater private
sector involvement in the work of government
through partnership arrangements, contracting out,
and privatized forms of urban governance. This was
framed as a key component of the wider search for
new solutions, arising in part from the search for
cost efficiencies, in part from the alleged failure of
previous efforts to tackle tough urban problems,
and in part from the magnitude of the challenges
confronting cities in the face of globalization. The
macro drivers of public sector reform and financing
were increasingly pegged to the imperatives of
global economic integration, not to the political
choices of neoliberal governments. Governmental
restraint and conservative financial management
were therefore naturalized, while the solution space
for the most intractable of urban problems was both
narrowed and partially privatized:
Allied to [the] process of opening up national economies
has been the much greater attention paid by governments
to the control of inflation, the imposition of limits on
public spending and borrowing and the efficacy of the
public sector [which] has set new limits to the volume of
resources available to assist disadvantaged areas and
groups and to create programmes for urban regeneration.
This has encouraged policy makers to look elsewhere,
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to the private sector and to local communities, for
additional resources to fund their efforts. (OECD,
1996: 19)
Urban growth often produces problems. In the past,
urban problems generated solutions in the form of new
products and services which became integral to social
and economic development. If problems persist,
however, it is a sign that cities are not sufficiently
innovative. When that is the case, it is useful to consult
the business community. (OECD, 1994: 110)
OECD policy documents published during the
1990s chronicle the progressive mainstreaming of
neoliberal urban regeneration strategies, pioneered
by the Reagan and Thatcher governments a decade
earlier, such as enterprise zones (which offer tax
abatements and other inducements to private enter-
prise as a way to affect business location, hiring, and
investment decisions) and successor policies such as
City Challenge and the Single Regeneration Budget
in the UK (which require communities of interest to
come together to compete for government resources).
Notably, when such interventions yielded no more
than modest outcomes, this prompted not so much a
rethinking as a redoubling of effort. Commenting
on the limited effectiveness of these and similar
business-oriented programs, the OECD subsequently
arrived at the conclusion that this represented a fail-
ure not in design but of engagement: in the future,
the private sector would have to participate more
directly in the policy planning phase of regeneration
efforts principally through tripartite partnership
arrangements with the public sector and civil society,
which were declared to be the institutional model of
choice (OECD, 1998: 109, 111).
The recent interest in partnership comes from a number
of evolving realisations, which include (1) that central
government cannot solve all of societys problems alone
and is fiscally constrained; (2) that social problems are
multidimensional and that a number of different actors
are involved in confronting them; and (3) that there are
concentrations of deprivation where local specificities
oblige government to consult with actors closer to
the ground, such as community groups or the private
sector. (OECD, 1998: 111)
Theodore and Peck 31
Through such local partnerships, the private sector
is granted a greater role for engagement in and
leadership of local regeneration efforts, and nongov-
ernmental organizations are tasked with the respon-
sibility of enhancing public participation. In addition,
the shift from government design and delivery of
economic development programs towards more
reflexive, publicprivate governance is expected to
deepen the receptivity of local actors to the right
policy lessons, both vertically (between the local and
national levels) and horizontally (between localities
within and between countries), thereby facilitating
the spread of innovations between jurisdictions
(OECD, 1998: 11213). Given the great similarity
that exists among OECD countries in terms of the
nature of urban problems they are confronting, the
promise of a more coherent international response
might be realized (OECD, 1998: 130). But now har-
monization was being sought in broadly neoliberal
terms. What once were considered radical challenges
to the policy orthodoxies of spatial Keynesianism
marketization and privatization, retrenchment of the
welfare state, the rollback of the national role in
ameliorating inter-local uneven development were
increasingly to shape the taken-for-granted parame-
ters of policymaking practice in general, and OECD
policy advice in particular. A neoliberal policy frame
was duly consolidated.
Competing to win: normalizing
neoliberal urbanism
The millennial challenges of urban governance were
taken up again with the publication of a pair of syn-
thetic policy statements in the following decade:
Competitive Cities in the Global Economy (OECD,
2006) and Competitive Cities: A New Entrepreneurial
Paradigm in Spatial Development (OECD, 2007).
The analysis and advocacy embedded in these publi-
cations carried forward several themes from the 21st
Century report of the 1990s, including the need for
an entrepreneurial approach to local economic devel-
opment, the virtues of market-oriented modes of
regulatory reform, the importance of private sector
engagement in the policy process, and a generalized
suspicion of redistributive policies that favor targeted
areas of need or certain disadvantaged populations.
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The diagnosis of social distress, in particular, echoed
the earlier critiques of spatial Keynesian and wel-
farist approaches to poverty alleviation, dismissing
these as not only pass but counterproductive. The
Competitive Cities reports reflected increasingly
confident justifications for what was acknowledged
to be a drastic realignment of policy orthodoxies:
Inner city problems have long been considered a
residual problem of the welfare state More precisely,
the problem was identified as the concentration of
people with special needs. Consequently, the policy
response was to target more resources into deprived
areas to provide for the additional and special needs to
be found there
However, once the diagnosis of the fundamental
problem transformed to the view that the root cause
of the coincidence of physical decay and social
deprivation in the inner cities was the collapse of
the economic infrastructure there, the policy approach
began to change drastically.
The change in the perception of the aetiology of the
problem indicated that the idea that inner city problems
could be solved or even alleviated by targeting public
resources into such areas to meet special or additional
needs had become defunct . . . [It had also become]
painfully evident that old policy tools, more or less
characterized as problem-solving and distributional,
were hopelessly inadequate for the new policy objectives.
(OECD, 2007: 1718)
Moving on from well-worn critiques of Keynesian
welfarist approaches to urban development, OECD
policy documents of the late 2000s sought to develop
a new and more positive analysis of the role and
potential of urban areas in an increasingly intercon-
nected global economy. In contrast to the overriding
tenor of previous policy documents, which focused
on seemingly intractable problems of social distress
in older industrial cities, the principal aim of the
OECDs more recent policy statements has been to
recast cities and city-regions in the role of postindus-
trial command-and-control centers of globalizing
capitalism. Cities are now portrayed as vital nodes in
the circulatory systems of globalizing capital,
rather than as sites of social distress and economic
32 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
dislocation: Today, large cities, or metropolitan
regions (metro-regions), are the key loci of transna-
tional flows and function as essential spatial nodes
of the global economy to such an extent that one now
hears talk of a common market of metropolitan
economies (OECD, 2006: 30).
This 180 reorientation, in which cities become
engines of, rather than obstacles to, economic
growth reflects the consolidation of a new imaginary
of global urban development (see Jessop, 2002).
Emphasis is increasingly placed on the opportunities
available to city-regions presented by conditions such
as deepening global integration and the ascendancy
of clustered forms of economic development.
The renewed openness of the continental economies of
both Europe and North America has provided cities
with opportunities to assert new economic roles outside
older notions of fixed national economies (implying
urban hierarchies). (OECD, 2006: 60)
Yet, for all the evident ideological appeal of this
vision of devolved responsibility, in which com-
petitive cities make their own opportunities in a
globalizing economy, the inconvenient reality is
that cities remain, to some extent, creatures of their
respective national economies. So, it is acknowl-
edged that there is a positive correlation between
growth rates of metro-regions and those experi-
enced at the national level (OECD, 2006: 65).
Nonetheless, few cities can count on the support
of their national governments in what is now con-
ventionally portrayed and ideologically justified
as an unrelenting, inter-urban war for investment,
talent, and jobs. Instead, cities are advised that they
must fight these battles on the terrain of urban
governance. Traditional forms of municipal govern-
ment are deemed inadequate to the task of steering
dynamic, metro-regional economies. The resulting
challenges of urban public management demand
new modes of metropolitan governance, based in
greater intergovernmental cooperation and partner-
ship, in some cases extending to regional networks
of municipalities primed to initiate competitive-
ness-oriented regional development projects and to
share corresponding forms of good practice (OECD,
2006: 200). Partnerships may involve labor unions
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and other social actors, albeit never in dominant
positions and always yoked to an overriding com-
mitment to projects of competitive urban develop-
ment. To this end, OECD recommendations to local
policymakers principally focus on the importance
of crafting a strategy aligned with the overarching
imperatives of metro-regional competitiveness; the
need to involve the private sector in metropolitan
governance; the wisdom of enhancing urban ame-
nities; and the benefits of pursuing cluster-based
approaches to economic development (OECD,
2006, 2007). The upshot is that, if policymakers
are to successfully navigate the transition from
the period when objectives were protective and
defensive of existing capacities rather than oriented
towards . . . the future, they will need to learn the
lessons of policy failure [that] have helped to shape
the new political economy for territories (OECD,
2007: 233).
The OECD, of course, positions itself as a pur-
veyor of those very lessons both the hard lessons of
the past and the more seductive lessons of the future.
It seeks to do so not simply by mirroring the prevail-
ing state of the art in urban policymaking, but by
positioning its discursive interventions and coordi-
native efforts within a purposive frame, in order to
consolidate favored policy directions and as a means
of stimulating new rounds of experimentation and
emulation. The organizations big tent ethos means
that it must carefully divine the central tendencies in
policy development (at the risk of seeming to be par-
tisan, detached, or irrelevant), while also galvanizing
purposive change. In its most recent rounds of urban
policymaking, this has been coordinated by the
OECDs Territorial Development Policy Committee
(TDPC), which in 1999 initiated an ambitious
program of urban territorial reviews, which are
conducted in conjunction with host metro-regions
and which involve extensive processes of policy
evaluation, consultation, peer review, and the prepa-
ration of policy recommendations. This cross-scalar
process helps to ground truth OECD policy recom-
mendations across a range of local settings; it enables
accelerated, transnational learning between cities;
and it draws on the implicit legitimacy of bottom
up policy development and (place) named models,
enrolling policy constituencies along the way.
Theodore and Peck 33
The OECDs increasingly sophisticated urban
policy discourse very effectively exploits the soft
centers of the current policymaking consensus,
framing policy choices not so much in the terms of
brutal imperatives of competition as in the language
of opportunities for inclusive growth. This has all
the hallmarks of a third-way policy confection:
inhabiting a dynamic and experimental political
center; pragmatically embracing what works; con-
fronting the hard choices of welfare retrenchment
while seizing the opportunities of globalization. As
Neil Bradford aptly observes, this amounts to a
seductive blend of new localist discourses, wherein
neoliberal impulses are melded with and discur-
sively subsumed under those associated with
learning region notions of innovation-rich eco-
nomic development (see Florida 1995; Hudson,
1999; Morgan, 1997), on the one hand, and with the
concept of third sector community-led develop-
ment on the other (see Putnam, 2000; Amin et al.,
2002; Mayer, 2003). The Competitive Cities report
therefore
constitutes the most comprehensive and mature
expression of the organizational discourse on urban
affairs that structures the TDPCs activities . . . [Here]
we find a discursive hybrid that blends themes and
concepts from [several] new localism frameworks. At
the centre of the TDPC was the learning region. But
it was framed by the neoliberal and flanked by the
community development perspectives . . . Its goal of
the self-reliant learning region departed from both
Keynesian equalization and neoliberal adjustment. Its
design was based on a novel instrument mix privileging
customized interventions in hard and soft infrastructures,
replacing command-and-control regulation and direct
spending with a variety of incentives and supports.
(Bradford, 2008: 141, 143)
We would not take issue with this perceptive reading,
except to question whether the policy configuration
described here genuinely represents a move beyond
neoliberalism as opposed to a mutation (and contin-
ued mainstreaming) of roll-out neoliberal urbanism,
an evolving policy frame necessarily responsive to
the failures of simple deregulation, marketization,
and governmental withdrawal, but positively oriented
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towards low-capacity and market-friendly forms
of devolved governance (see Brenner and Theodore,
2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Porter and Craig,
2004). Roll-out neoliberalism at the urban scale is
associated with often improvised extensions to mar-
ket sustaining governance, enrolling a wide array of
social (and indeed cultural) partners in the projects
of economic development and social amelioration.
The attendant initiatives tend to be task oriented and
project based, rarely entailing fixed funding lines,
new (de facto or de jure) entitlements, or the empow-
erment of organized constituencies or bureaucratic
delivery systems. Such flexible responses are most
often legitimized under the sign of partnership, with
its veneer of consensualism that barely conceals the
reality of asymmetrical relations, systematic mar-
ginalization, and democratic deficit.
For all the centrist tone of these documents, they
come on the heels of two decades of increasingly
strident advocacy of the hard lessons of the neolib-
eral critique of spatial Keynesianism (particularly
concerning the causes of urban economic decline
and the proper scope of governmental responses at
the national and local level). Cumulatively, many of
these positions have since passed into the taken-
for-granted, commonsense of transnational urban
policy, and as such may safely remain latent or
unsaid. However, neoliberal precepts may be said
to condition the pre-emptive parameters of OECD
urban policy, functioning as a kind of silent veto on
aspects of the policy package (say, regarding sustained
public investment or community participation) that
might significantly impinge on the fiscally con-
strained, market-facing policy orthodoxy. Advocacy
of learning-region policy, for example, does not
extend to discussions of the necessity of long-run
state support or the potential benefits of picking
winners, either spatially or sectorally; and paeans to
community involvement will stop short of advocat-
ing deep democratization or popular participation
with respect to fundamental policy priorities. As
Bradford (2008: 143) correctly concedes, the para-
digm remains rooted in liberal economic ideas about
competition and adjustment and, although it is
indeed more attentive to serial failures in markets
and market-oriented policy, and to the negative
34 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
externalities associated with rising social inequality,
the legitimate(d) scope for responding to these
challenges is strictly circumscribed.
These are among the ways in which late neoliber-
alism works, as a normalized but nevertheless cri-
sis-prone policy paradigm. It defines a conceptual
territory, or permissible policy space, within which
appropriate solutions can be sought and fashioned,
but its quiet sanctions may not always be entirely
visible, except in the breach. This is also an adaptive
discourse that constantly fuses with, and selectively
appropriates from, parallel policy discourses that do
not otherwise threaten the fundamental neoliberal
precepts of market-oriented and pro-growth devel-
opment, restrained (social) intervention, and selec-
tive public sector austerity. These adaptations and
mutations of roll-out neoliberal urbanism are clearly
manifest in the deliberations and documents of the
OECD, given its role as an international clearing-
house for policy discourse, where the endless search
for new centers of gravity within orthodox urban
policy entails a continuing process of engaging with
(and partially absorbing) others. In recent rounds of
OECD policy deliberations, this has even extended,
in an almost Orwellian fashion, to a bizarre quasi-
embrace of some of the sharpest critiques of neo-
liberal urbanism, including an extended discussion
of Harveys (1989) landmark analysis of the transi-
tion from urban managerialism to urban entrepre-
neurialism along with the invocation of numerous
other critical interventions (for example, Leitner and
Sheppard, 1998).
In a curious manifestation of practice imitating
critique (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2006), the
contested transition from managerialist urbanism to
urban entrepreneurialism is effectively naturalized
in the OECDs Competitive Cities statement, to the
point of declaring a post-Keynesian fait accompli.
The Keynesian managerialist moment having
been declared dead, with the assistance of Harveys
(1989) analysis, the path is duly cleared for a
pragmatic consideration of the pitfalls that policy
planners should avoid in order to obtain long-lasting
benefits from entrepreneurial approaches (OECD,
2007: 29). But in this revisionist, policy-prescriptive
script, economic globalization . . . caused the
overdetermined entrepreneurial realignment, not
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political choices, leading competitive city policies
to be mainstream[ed], with admittedly mixed
results; in the process, however, a new paradigm is
installed neoliberal in all but name from which
urban policymakers can creatively build (OECD,
2007: 15, 9, 10).5 The critical literature on entrepre-
neurial urbanism is generously cited, but none of it
is read as an indictment of the very project in which
the OECDs urban policy networkers are evidently
engaged; instead, it becomes an affirmation of the
irreversibility of the trend away from Keynesian
urbanism, a vision of the new reality.
This mainstreaming of urban entrepreneurialism
blends seamlessly with the discourses of resilient
localism (in the face of external shocks), endogenous
development, and proactive partnership. The urban
consequently defines the preeminent scale for fash-
ioning coping strategies. In the words of the OECDs
Sergio Arzeni, coordinator of the Local Economic
and Employment Development (LEED) program:
The local level is one of proximity to problems and
stakeholders and thus one in which appropriate
solutions can be sought. It is there that adjustments to
the supply of and demand for jobs and skills can be
made and particular types of incentives can be
stimulated . . . The local level is both the sphere of
corporate competitiveness and the place in which
unsatisfied economic needs and potential sources of
jobs can be identified more easily. It is at this level that
many job-producing projects, training schemes and
social outreach programmes are formulated, selected,
launched and sustained. The local level is also a
place for the mobilisation and intervention of actors
from the public sector, trade unions and employers,
businesses, voluntary associations and community
groups, co-operating within partnership arrangements.
(Arzeni, 2009: 3)
The LEEDs Barcelona principles (see Table 1) are
duly framed in the language of consensual local-
ism, but must ultimately place their faith in competi-
tive coping strategies: resilience in the face of
macroeconomic shocks; making the case for public
investment, where this is feasible in the context of
constrained urban fiscal capacity and generalized
austerity; and an abiding faith in the magical proper-
ties of local leadership and partnership.
Theodore and Peck 35

Table 1.The OECD LEED programs Barcelona principles

I. Dont waste the crisis, but respond with leadership and purpose
Provide pro-active and collaborative leadership at the local level
II. Make the case for continued public investment and public services and the taxes and other sources of
investment required
Make the case for investment
III. In the long-term: build local economic strategies which align with long-term drivers and identify future sources
of jobs, enterprise, and innovation
Robust long-term economic strategy
IV. In the short-term: focus on retaining productive people, business, incomes, jobs, and investment projects
Purposeful short-term action is needed
V. Build the tools and approaches to attract and retain external investment over the long-term
Investment attraction and readiness
VI. Building genuine long-term relationships with the private sector, trade unions, and other key partners
Relationships matter and need increased attention
VII. Take steps to ensure the sustainability and productivity of public works, infrastructure, and major developments/
events
Effective public works and major investments
VIII. Local leaders should act purposefully to support their citizens in the face of increased hardship
Stay close to the people
IX. Local economies have benefited and should continue to benefit from being open and attractive to international
populations and capital
Stay open to the world
X. Communicate and align with national and other higher tier governments
Build nationallocal alliances
Source: Clark (2009: 1314).

Concluding discussion: neoliberal long ascendancy of neoliberal urbanism have been

turns and urban futures
There are many ways to chart the ascendency, and
periodic mutation, of neoliberal urbanism over the
past three decades. From the crisis-driven retrench-
ment of collective urban services to the promotion of
good business climates, from the orchestration of
inter-urban competition by national and international
agencies through to the rise of task-focused gover-
nance, and from the downloading of regulatory
responsibility from higher tiers of government to the
development of best practice and benchmarking
techniques, urban scholars have extensively docu-
mented the shift from the managerial urban policies
of the Keynesian era towards a range of market-ori-
ented and entrepreneurial approaches (see Harvey,
1989; Clarke and Gaile, 1998; Hall and Hubbard,
1998; Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Accounts of the
variously framed around the experiences of suppos-
edly paradigmatic cities and otherwise ordinary
cities, those of global cities with their leading/
bleeding-edge experiments and those of localities
struggling near the bottom of the urban hierarchy;
they have traced the formation and diffusion of
best-practice policies and they have explored now-
mundane forms of urban policymaking; and they
have variously documented the top down imposition
of market rule by national governments and multilat-
eral agencies, the proliferation of home-grown or
endogenous forms of urban entrepreneurialism,
and the horizontal spread of policy norms and
practices through inter-urban networks (see Leitner
and Sheppard, 1998; McCann and Ward, 2011).
Here, we have sought to make a complementary,
yet distinctive, contribution to this body of work by
focusing on a relatively neglected space of urban

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36 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
policy formation that of the OECD. A product of
the Keynesian consensus, today the OECD occupies,
narrates, and incrementally shapes the new normal
of competitive urbanism. Like other multilateral
organizations, the OECD functions as a center
of influence and persuasion, narrating the contours
of policy problems while propagating the kinds of
solutions that will find a receptive audience. It has
been a pioneer in normative policy advocacy, high-
lighting leading-edge advances and showcasing
favored examples of national and local practice; and
it plays an increasingly important role in packaging
and framing these innovations in terms that facili-
tate rapid emulation across jurisdictional boundar-
ies. As we have argued, though, the OECD occupies
a particular position in the universe of multilateral
organizations. It is not in the business of structurally
adjusting countries or cities; its policy advice and
advocacy conspicuously lack the force of law or
economic sanction. Rather, the OECD practices
soft governance, documenting, codifying, and
honing emergent norms and shifting consensuses
across various fields of policy and practice from
social and urban policy, through crisis management
and stewardship, to advice on liberalization and
devolved delivery systems (Deacon and Kaasch,
2008; Woodward, 2009). In this sense, the OECD is
not a unilateral maker of policy norms, but nor does
it passively reflect the status quo ex ante. Rather, the
organization operates as a mediator and translator of
those policy norms.
The methodological strategy that we have adopted
here, involving a meta-analysis of the OECDs stra-
tegic and synthetic policy narratives, is but one way
of approaching these issues. Although it is clearly no
substitute for the grounded analysis of policy prac-
tice, it can be a useful component of an enriched
methodological repertoire, within which at least two
distinctive contributions can be highlighted. First, in
tracing inter-textual continuities and breaks over a
period of decades, this approach exposes drifts and
shifts in policy narratives-cum-rationales that may
be (more) difficult to detect in situated or temporally
specific analyses. The manner in which policy
formulations and discursive fixes chain together
through time, fragmenting or consolidating, becomes
especially germane here (see Sum, 2006, 2009).
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Second, at a time in which policy discourses,
rationalities, practices, and models are being mobi-
lized transnationally in historically distinctive ways
(Simmons et al., 2008), new methodological strat-
egies must be fashioned for the task of following
mobile policy formulas, actors, and technologies,
often into new (or re-tasked) arenas and circuits
(Peck and Theodore, 2012).
Putting one such approach to work, and looking
back over the past quarter-century of OECD urban
policy advice, it is possible to gain an appreciation of
the long ascendancy (and evolution) of neoliberal
urbanism and its increasingly total critique of the
preceding Keynesian welfarist and urban manageri-
alist settlement. From the rupturing of the Keynesian
consensus in the late 1980s, to the period of neolib-
eral policy experimentation that followed in the
1990s, to the repositioning of the metropolitan scale
simultaneously as a site of resilient coping strategies
and as a key node in a globalizing economy in
the 2000s, the OECD has been a leading voice in
codifying and disseminating a portfolio of urban
policies that effectively demarcate the parameters of
mainstream policymaking. Furthermore, because
the OECD occupies a unique position in distended
networks of policy advice and expertise, situated as
it is as an ostensibly impartial observer positioned
at arms length from national and subnational gov-
ernments, its analyses have played an important role
in the construction and consolidation of neoliberal
urbanism as a transnational commonsense approach
to urban governance.
The long-run patterning of OECD policy narra-
tives documented here reveals that, following the
break with Keynesian welfarist approaches to urban
development in the 1980s, the subsequent neoliber-
alization of urban policy portfolios occurred through
a protracted realignment of policy objectives and
programmatic mechanisms, rather than through
some unilateral, top down imposition. This repre-
sents neither a simple nor a preordained transition to
the neoliberal city. Rather, the interdigitation of
urbanization and neoliberalization has occurred
through continuous cycles of experimentation,
consolidation, embedding, and discursive innova-
tion (see Brenner et al., 2010a), simultaneously
centering on a shifting cluster of favored strategies
Theodore and Peck 37
while, through a deftly negotiated form of prioritiza-
tion and silencing, charting a preferred direction (if
not destination) for reform efforts.
Here, the OECD both reflects and helps stabilize
mainstream diagnoses and prescriptions for the
constantly reformulated transnational urban crisis.
OECD urban policy statements can be seen as epi-
phenomenal reflections of prevailing urban develop-
ment discourses, while at the same time responding
to the organizations remit for proactive policy
development, often achieved through the indirect
means of policy surveillance and evaluation, expert
isomorphism, and purposive distillation of transna-
tional best practice. In this respect, the OECD is both
a follower and a leader in transnational policy pre-
scription. It may occasionally push the envelope of
mainstream policy discourse, but it will generally
seek to remain within that envelope.
For these reasons, the policy space defined by the
OECD represents, in its own right, an important
barometer of the international policy consensus.
This consensus is not simply found, of course; it is
ideologically constructed, in this case across a quite
diverse membership, and selectively interlaced with
consistent currents in expert thinking. As such, the
orchestrated deliberations and synthetic statements
of the OECD are a gauge, of sorts, of the moving
center of gravity in the transnational policy conver-
sation. As a result, it would be unwise to dismiss
OECD discourse as just words, as pious statements
of policymaking intent that are otherwise detached
from on-the-ground realities, and indeed from the
means of execution. This would be wrong on two
levels, firstly because OECD positions are invariably
forged out of these very local realities (a process
institutionalized in the territorial review regime),
and secondly because this is a discourse of well-
chosen words, intricately negotiated (and often
vetted) by members and very carefully articulated
by the OECDs professional staff and by its network
of trusted experts. As such, they provide a window
not so much onto the cutting edges of policy innova-
tion, more onto the regularized commonsense
negotiated across this group of advanced industrial
nations. Although necessarily polyglot, in many
ways the OECD continues to speak with a continen-
tal European accent, thereby establishing another
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set of ideological benchmarks for calibrating the
extent to which the European social democracies
have embraced the new times of neoliberal urbanism,
as pioneered by the Anglo-American nations and
crisis-tested in Latin America.
We are not suggesting, therefore, that the OECD
is a vanguardist organization. Instead, it works to
catalyze consensus, energize preferred forms of
policy development, and stabilize conventions. Its
activities demarcate the soft center of policy devel-
opment, rather than its hard edges. The OECD
operates as an active presence in a fluid, transna-
tional policy space a transfer agent working to
enable the construction and circulation of emergent
policy norms and conventions. But, rather than being
a passive bearer of policy orthodoxies that are trans-
mitted from below and then circulated throughout
the OECD zone, the organization creates openings
for policy models to be developed, debated, and
disseminated. In this sense, it has been a pioneer of
the types of inquisitive and meditative policy devel-
opment that are now widely used by other multilat-
eral agencies. This represents one moment in the
making of a specifically neoliberal form of policy
commonsense.
We characterize this as a neoliberal commonsense,
with the proviso that this is by definition a flex-
ible and adaptable credo, not the rigid dogma that is
sometimes portrayed. During the 1980s, when neo-
liberal ideologies were combined with state power on
a generalized basis for the first time, celebrations of
the potential of markets always traveled with targeted
(auto)critiques of the pernicious role of the state; it
was maintained that governments, by definition, can
only interfere with the working of the economy; gov-
ernments cause recessions and depressions by their
very actions (Blyth, 2002: 144). For its part, the
OECD was understandably rather slower to shake off
the last vestiges of Keynesian orthodoxy, but soon
would be not only joining the chorus against the
misinterventionist state but sanctioning a wide range
of individualistic, sociocultural, and indeed moral
critiques of urban problems in general and the new
urban poor in particular. This first moment in the neo-
liberalization of urban policy within the OECD zone
forged policymaking parameters that continue to hold
sway even today: macroeconomic transformations
38 European Urban and Regional Studies 19(1)
and structural changes in the urban system are
systematically detached from sources of national
political responsibility, being reframed in the obfus-
catory language of local responses to global impera-
tives. The legitimate space for national government
interventions has been correspondingly constricted,
initially to the exclusion of welfarist or redistribu-
tionist actions, and subsequently to most forms of
investment lacking an explicit market rationale. As a
result, urban fortunes have increasingly been (re)
constructed as matters of urban initiative and local
resilience. The shrill attacks on the self-destructive
habits of the urban poor have subsided, to be replaced
by an all-encompassing entrepreneurialism, adorned
with piecemeal and discretionary responses to social
exclusion.
The protracted second act of neoliberal urbanism,
however, has been animated both by the very intrac-
tability of urban social problems (exacerbated by
market-driven inequalities and by retrenchment of
the social state), and by the increasing reliance on
metro-regions as economic engines (in the context
of the unequal opportunities presented by global
economic integration and by the lapse into disuse of
many national economic policy instruments). This
has drawn OECD member states towards the intro-
duction of various partnership arrangements, stake-
holder modes of urban governance, and institutional
flanking mechanisms designed to sustain urban
growth at least selectively. Although the problems
of crude marketization and dogmatic deregulation
are increasingly acknowledged by knowing policy-
makers, a centrist form of neoliberal ideology con-
tinues to permeate OECD discourse. For example,
what the organization continues to portray as a stub-
born and perplexing urban paradox (OECD, 2006,
2007) the spatial coexistence of dynamic economic
development and rising social inequalities becomes
a rationale for ameliorative forms of social inclusion
within a competitive cities paradigm, not the basis
for an indictment of that paradigm. The increasing
reliance by OECD member states on market mecha-
nisms (and their proxies) in order to achieve urban
redevelopment goals might have been expected to
exacerbate problems of social polarization within
cities. Perhaps this is a paradox within the OECDs
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paradigm of orthodox urban policy, but it is anything
but a paradox indeed it is a quite predictable
feature of neoliberal urbanism.
Through a process of ideological devolution,
such problems must find local solutions, if they are
to find solutions at all. This is one of the reasons
behind the adoption of bounded, local experimenta-
tion as a preferred mode of policy development.
And this has been associated, quite conspicuously,
with the adoption of softer discourses of social
capital, empowerment, coordination, partnership,
social cohesion, and inclusion where these are pli-
able and compatible with the strong discourse of
neoliberalism. Likewise, the mantras of enhanced
private sector and third sector engagement continue,
in partial compensation for the vacuums generated
by the rollback of redistributive policies and the
retrenchment of the social state (see OECD, 2007).
This has been accompanied by the continued natu-
ralization of fiscal constraints and problem com-
plexity as a justification for government inaction
across a wide range of issues, including sociospatial
inequality, entrenched poverty, and environmental
degradation. Exceptions to this (market) rule can
be found, of course, but their very status of relative
exceptionality (as local alternatives) represents a
measure of the hegemonic hold of neoliberal
urbanism (Theodore et al., 2011).
One of the sources of the political durability of
neoliberal urbanism has been the ability to appro-
priate and integrate institutional flanking mecha-
nisms that contain some of the more destructive
tendencies of market rule without fundamentally
challenging the (il)logics of the evolving develop-
ment model itself. For this reason, projects of neo-
liberalization are associated with experimentation
and adaptation, institutional variation and hybridity,
rather than static ensembles of marketized institu-
tions (Brenner et al., 2010b). The texts, practices,
and dialogic spaces of the OECD, we have argued
here, have played a significant role in the stabiliza-
tion and reproduction of this neoliberal urban set-
tlement especially its Janus-faced soft center,
which can be seen as a zone of compromise, accom-
modation, and cooptation in the mutating project of
market rule.
Theodore and Peck 39
Acknowledgement
This paper was prepared for the Assembled urbanism
workshop at the Open University, 1819 June 2010. We are
grateful to participants at the workshop for a constructive
and insightful discussion, and to Allan Cochrane and Kevin
Ward, in particular, for hosting the event. We are also
grateful to anonymous sources in and around the OECD
for insightful conversations around the development of
urban policy conventions.
Funding
The research reported here was supported by the Ford
Foundation, though we alone are responsible for the
interpretations offered.
Notes
1. The OECDs current membership comprises: Australia,
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic,
Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South
Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the
USA. The recent effort to recast the organization as a
globalization hub entailed the initiation of accession
talks with several countries (Chile, Estonia, Israel, and
Slovenia joined in 2010, as negotiations with Russia
continued), and a state of enhanced engagement
currently exists with Brazil, China, India, Indonesia,
and South Africa.
2. Following Hall (1993: 279), a policy paradigm can be
defined as a framework [of understanding] . . . that
specifies not only the goals of the policy and the kind
of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also
the very nature of the problems they are meant to be
addressing.
3. This was the source of barely contained internal ten-
sions within the OECD, although there were already
signs that neoliberal arguments were beginning to gain
ground (Woodward, 2009).
4. On the adjustment of policy instruments versus para-
digmatic alignment, see Hall (1993) and Peck (2011).
5. Carrying local residents and stakeholders along with
this process, however, will require an active process to
nurture entrepreneurial culture among residents [since
all] the actors in the local economy, including resi-
dents, business executives and government officials,
have to learn how to be entrepreneurial . . . thinking
and behaving entrepreneurially, or competitively, a
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process that should involve incorporation into an
inclusive policy process (OECD, 2007: 13).
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