Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Authors' Blog: Explaining ‘power to’: incubation and agenda building in an urban regime.

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is available in OnlineFirst.


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Explaining ‘power to’: incubation and agenda building in an urban regime.



Stefania Ravazzi is assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy, and Vice-President of the LaPo-Laboratory of Public Policy. Her current research focuses on urban governance and deliberative democracy. Her recent contributions on these topics were published in Métropoles and Journal of Public Deliberation. She may be reached at: stefania.ravazzi@unito.it



Silvano Belligni is professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy. His current research focuses on urban governance and corruption. His scholarly publications have analyzed urban power structure, local élites, water policy, the theory of governance, and corruption mechanisms.


From the urban governance perspective, although not free from structural constraints, local actors can exercise a significant influence on urban policies and affect the life conditions of residents. Within this paradigm, the urban regime theory, developed from the works of Elkin and Stone, has placed the decisional power of urban policy-makers in the foreground. From the urban regime perspective, not only can local actors systematically affect the context through their public decisions but, in particular situations, stable and enduring governing coalitions can even change the whole consolidated policy mix of a city through the implementation of a new policy agenda. Stone has labeled ‘power to’ as being the capacity to promote and sustain new urban agendas and to foster great changes in the social and economic context.