the ways in which institutions are made and the way that those institutions in
turn inXuence actors and their decision-making has, as a result, become a major
focus for the literature on comparative local governance. Most debate has been
around the concept of urban regime, a framework for analysis developed in the
United States (Stone 1989 ; Stoker 1995 ) but then applied in a considerable range
of studies outside North America (Mossberger and Stoker 2001 ). This part of
the chapter lays out the basic ideas of regime analysis before exploring the com-
parative material related to it. The world of urban political theory is much broader
than regime analysis (see Judge, Stoker, and Wolman 1995 ) but it is the regime
concept that is the most widely travelled from a comparative local governance
perspective.
According to Stone, regimes are ‘‘the informal arrangements by which public
bodies and private interests function together in order to be able to make and carry
out governing decisions’’ (Stone 1989 , 6 ). EVective urban governance is achieved
through building civic cooperation across institutional boundaries. 1 The making
and sustaining of interorganizational relationships are central to Stone’s under-
standing of local politics. A regime constitutes ‘‘a relatively stable groupwith access
to institutional resourcesthat enable it to have a sustained role in making governing
decisions’’ (emphasis in original) (Stone 1989 , 4 ). Informal modes of coordination
are explained using what is called the social production model of power. The
previous more formal understanding of power as the exercise of detailed inXuence
or control over decision-making gives way to a more informal understanding that
power is about giving direction and then mobilizing the resources necessary to
ensure that the vision is fulWlled:
If the conventionalmodel of urbanpolitics is one of social control...then the one proposed
here might be called ‘‘the social-production model’’. It is based on the question of how, in a
world of limited and dispersed authority, actors work together across institutional
lines to produce a capacity to govern and to bring about publicly signiWcant results. (Stone
1989 , 8 – 9 )
In a complex, fragmented urban world, the paradigmatic form of power is that
which enables certain interests to blend their capacities to achieve common
purposes. The power sought by regimes is the ‘‘power to’’ or the capacity to act,
rather than ‘‘power over’’ others or social control (Stone 1989 , 229 ). Regime analysis
directs attention to the conditions under which such eVective long-term coalitions
emerge in order to accomplish public purposes (Stoker 1995 ).
The social production model is about the exercise of pre-emptive power and
the spreading of inXuence. There are two diVerent types of relationship between
actors. TheWrst is the relationship between the organizations at thecoreof a
1 The discussion in this section draws on joint work with Graham Smith, of Southampton
University.
504 gerry stoker