England’s devolution settlement is entering its most active phase yet. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 has put strategic authorities on a permanent legal footing, and the incoming premiership of Andy Burnham — himself a former Metro Mayor — looks set to push power and funding out to city-regions further and faster still. But new powers are not the same thing as strong governance. Drawing on the concept of institutional thickness and recent research on place leadership, this briefing explains why some places turn devolved powers into effective strategy while others do not – and sets out what government, Combined Authorities and their partners need to do about it.
“Our paper asks why some English city-regions turn devolved powers into effective strategy while others struggle to get off the ground. We revive a decades-old idea from economic geography, institutional thickness, to explain the gap between places, using a refinement of the concept, which splits institutional thickness into two layers: a formal dimension (the organisations and partnerships you could put in a diagram) and an informal one (the trust, shared mental models and norms that make collaborations work effectively). Distributed leadership is vital. Places can look similarly ‘thick’ on paper while performing very differently in practice, because it’s the informal layer: invisible, slow to build, and easy for funders to overlook, that is doing the real work“
Des McNulty and Anne Green
This paper sets out what a more systematic approach to accelerating devolution would look like: funding the informal as well as the formal side of institutional thickness; identifying and backing the people who do the less visible and frequently unacknowledged work of convening partners; targeting support by starting capacity rather than by prominence; and crucially reforming central government’s own behaviour as a precondition for, not merely a complement to, effective devolution.
Meet the author
Des McNulty
Des McNulty was Dean for Public Policy and Assistant Vice Principal for civic engagement and place leadership at the University of Glasgow 2016-2021. He is Vice Chair of the Glasgow Commission for Economic Growth and a member of the Regional Economic Partnership Board. He is an Honorary Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and an OECD consultant. He is a member of the NIHR-funded Glasgow Health Determinants Research Collaborative.
Before joining Glasgow University, Des was an elected member of the Scottish Parliament, Minister for Social Justice and Chair of the Parliament’s Finance Committee. He also had senior leadership roles in local government. He is Chair of the UKRI-funded Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub Advisory Board at the University of Birmingham. Recent publications include papers on place leadership and collaboration, child poverty in Glasgow and HE/FE futures in Scotland.
Professor Anne Green
Anne Green is Professor of Regional Economic Development and Co-Director at City-REDI, University of Birmingham. She has a background of working in multi-disciplinary research institutes in universities. Her research interests encompass regional, urban and rural economic development issues, especially in relation to local labour markets and employment and skills, and span migration, commuting, area regeneration, governance and public policy. She has a long track record of research funded by government. She is a Co-Investigator of the UKRI-funded Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub. She is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association, the Royal Geographic Society and the Academy of Social Sciences.