State rescaling in practice: urban governance reform in Toronto: Fid-Bau Portal

State rescaling in practice: urban governance reform in Toronto

Horak, Martin

This paper examines governance reform in the Toronto area through the lens of literature on state rescaling. Over the past 20 years, Toronto has been the site of numerous initiatives to shift the spatial contours of urban governance. Viewing these as varied manifestations of the practice of state rescaling allows for a broad analysis of empirical patterns and trends, and informs the empirically underdeveloped literature on state rescaling with new evidence. The paper presents an inductive, historical, and agent-centered account of governance reform in Toronto. It finds that while state rescaling often originates as a response to the policy challenges arising from social change, economic restructuring, and urban growth, actual rescaling practices are shaped by a variety of locally contingent institutional and political factors. It also argues that in recent years, the long-standing practice of jurisdictional rescaling, which involves comprehensive scalar shifts in governing authority, has largely been replaced by task-specific rescaling, characterized by problem-driven initiatives to mobilize governing authority across multiple governing scales. The paper discusses the causes and the broader implications of this shift.