Universities and Territorial Development: Reshaping the Regional Role of UK Universities

The regional role of universities is of increasing concern both to the managers of universities and to regional and national policy-makers. Changes in the external environment are having a significant effect on the nature of the university and its approach to managing its interactions with external stake-holders, especially at a regional scale. Changes in the conceptualisation of regional development and in regional strategies also place universities more centrally to new policies. In the UK, since the late 1990s, a number of new national initiatives have dramatically increased the support for regional engagement in parallel with the application of regional level policies towards university activities. In consequence survey evidence suggests a growing focus on local and regional communities in university missions, but with a varying degree of identification for specific territorial scales. New institutional arrangements or responses include internal changes within universities such as new regional offices, and more significantly perhaps new collaborative regional arrangements and associations.