Cornwall’s devolution deal: Towards a more sustainable governance?

Abstract

This article considers the Devolution Deal signed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in the summer of 2015. It asks if the Deal constitutes a more sustainable approach to governance, concluding that whilst there are some factors that help to enhance sustainability, other areas urgently require more attention. These claims are made through an analysis of a model of sustainability which emphasises the importance of networks and feedback loops envisaging civil society as an adaptive organism. This helps to show that although power is significantly dispersed in some aspects of the ‘Cornwall Deal’, this latter does little to alter the highly centralised nature of governance across England, or provide spaces where local actors can feed back into central policy.