As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham was extolling the virtues of devolution, and the role universities can play in powering up local economies, long before he became Prime Minister.
For a sector navigating turbulent times, the devolution agenda offers a rare glimmer of hope. Universities’ relationship with Whitehall has often proven choppy, buffeted by changes in government direction and shifting political currents. Their ties with local and regional governments have tended to make for smoother sailing: mayors, councils and regional policymakers usually have a more rounded understanding of what universities bring to a place, and a greater stake in seeing those contributions endure.
If more power is heading out of Whitehall and into towns, cities and regions, as the government’s plans to “rewire the state” suggest, the assumption is that universities will surely benefit.
Certainly, the promised transfer of policy functions to regional authorities will provide further ground for universities to collaborate with their places on defining their local policy challenges and helping to address them. And as Peter O’Brien, Jane Robinson, and Helen Turner have recently highlighted, there is a huge amount of existing work and expertise on how to do this.
Yet, amid the devo-mania, there is a danger that universities draw the wrong lesson regarding the role they should play.
Anchors away
For the best part of fifteen years, the civic university agenda has increasingly become a university leadership agenda. Universities have been encouraged to see themselves as anchor institutions, convenors, and civic leaders. They have been cast as the organisations capable of stepping into the gaps left by years of local government austerity and institutional decline.
In many places, universities have genuinely been among the few organisations with the capacity and resources to take on those roles. They have embraced the opportunity to prove their value as civic institutions, and begun to shed their reputation as ivory towers detached from the communities around them.
But the challenges facing places rarely fit neatly within institutional boundaries. They increasingly require forms of civic leadership that can align democratic institutions, public services, businesses, anchor organisations and communities around shared priorities. As powers and responsibilities are devolved across places, effective civic leadership will depend on the capacity to connect these different institutions and interests.
Universities have an important part to play in this wider civic endeavour. But that does not necessarily mean taking the lead. As we argue in a new open access article with Sarah Chaytor, Louise Kempton, and John Tomaney, universities may be most effective when they support and strengthen wider civic capacity: contributing expertise, evidence, convening power and long-term commitment to place.
All hands on deck
A local leadership mindset encourages universities to start with themselves: What expertise do we have? What assets can we deploy? What initiative can we launch? Yet places rarely experience their challenges in those terms.
A civic mindset starts somewhere else: what does this place need, and who is best placed to provide it? Sometimes that will be a university. Sometimes it will not.
That is what a genuine partnership approach requires. Universities become one civic actor among many, rather than assuming they should sit at the centre of every conversation. The emphasis shifts from institutional visibility to shared outcomes, and from launching initiatives to building relationships and capacity that can endure.
This matters because the civic university’s biggest problem has never really been a shortage of activity. It has been a shortage of co-ordination and embeddedness.
Scratch beneath the surface and much civic work depends on a handful of committed individuals, a sympathetic senior leader, or a funding stream that might not exist in three years’ time. Launching a new initiative is relatively straightforward. Building trust across a place over ten or twenty years is not. Signing a civic agreement is only the start. Changing governance arrangements, incentives and institutional priorities so that civic engagement survives beyond a particular vice chancellor or funding programme is considerably harder.
Partnership, in other words, is harder than leadership – and its rewards are often much less visible.
And that brings us to Manchesterism.
The real lesson of Manchesterism
The Greater Manchester story is often told as a story about leadership. Burnham’s meteoric rise helps reinforce that narrative. But the deeper lesson of Greater Manchester is about what can happen when institutions develop the capacity to work collaboratively over time.
Whatever criticisms one might make of Manchesterism, its successes have been built on decades of collaboration between local authorities, public services, businesses and universities. Its strength comes less from any one institution leading than from a range of institutions finding ways to work together around shared priorities.
Universities have been an important part of that story. But they have generally been most effective when helping to strengthen the wider civic ecosystem rather than positioning themselves at its centre.
As devolution expands across England, that is the lesson other places ought to learn.
The most valuable contribution universities can make is not to become more prominent local leaders. It is to become better civic partners: more embedded in their places, more willing to share power and more focused on the slow, often unglamorous, under-recognised work of building relationships and collective capacity.
If devolution succeeds, it will not be because universities took a leading role. It will be because they helped make collective leadership possible.
