Selling The Region: The Problems of a Multi-Agency Approach in Promoting Regional Economies

The institutional landscape for promoting regions for foreign inward investment continues to evolve across all nations. In the UK the abandonment of regional development agencies has led to years of institutional flux and uncertainty. One nation in the UK, Wales has seen the most dramatic changes in structure. The Welsh Development Agency was arguably one of the most successful in the world but was abolished in 2006 and has seen no direct replacment. This paper carries out a qualitative investigation over a 6 year period analyzing stages in the process of promoting of region. The paper examines how the loss of a strong coordinating marketing agency, and an evolving multi-agency approach creates problems. The paper also explores whether the framework of organisational fields developed in organisation theory might provide a means of understanding how the evolving multi-agency approach to inward investment attraction can be highly problematic. The findings have implications applicable for any region promoting itself for inward investment.