Place leadership in emerging cross-border mega-city region: Hong Kong universities as strategic actors in the Greater Bay Area

• In Event: University governance through a comparative lens

Proposal

This paper analyses the role of universities in the complex process of cross-border place making in the emerging Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). It contributes to the special issue by investigating the conditions under which different forms of collective place leadership emerge through universities that both cooperate and compete with other actors in the cross-border mega-city region context.

Place leadership reinserts “structure” and “agency” into accounts of the processes of constructing the region (Sotarauta and Beer, 2017). Cross-border city regions exist in a variety of forms across diverse geographical, social, economic, political and institutional environments where the nature of the ‘border’ between places changes over time (Lundquist and Trippl, 2013). Universities are complex in terms of internal and institutional structures, which undermines their capacities to enact coherent place leadership roles (Fonseca et al., 2021). Universities are always located in place, but strategic roles individual universities play in creating the future of a specific place depend on each of the universities’ history, strengths and their own identities in the place, as well as perceived external opportunities and challenges, such as market needs in teaching, research and innovation. We know little about how multiple universities interact and create collective place leadership as part of the evolution of a place.

The GBA, launched in 2019 by the Chinese government, aims to build a global hub of innovation, high-tech and business. Its characterisation as Greater Bay Area (GBA) reflects on the one hand, the aim of integrating the economic sectors of several cities, provinces and territories across the evolving border between Mainland China and Hong Kong and Macao. On the other hand, it indicates the aspiration to compete with other bay areas, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, the Tokyo Bay Area, and the New York Bay Area (Mok 2022). Universities are posited as key players in the scientific, technological and innovation development of the GBA: since 2019, the higher education landscape has rapidly transformed with the creation of cross-border university partnerships, branch campuses, joint education and research programmes. Such patterns of cross-border institutional cooperation, induced by the new GBA policies, are counterbalanced by universities’ competitive behaviour, shaped by their distinctive history, organisational culture, internal structures, available resources, and strategic profile.

The study draws on earlier scoping interviews, combined with documentary analysis of changing strategies across four universities in Hong Kong, whose cross-border collaborative activities have grown over time, taking a variety of forms, including a liaison office, a research institute, a university hospital or a new branch campus, and has created flows of funding, students, researchers, managers and leaders with collaborative exchange activities. As the universities and other stakeholders realize interests and mobilise resources in the emerging cross-border mega-city region of the GBA, wider collaborative opportunities across higher education, industry, society and public policy actors can also be detected. The analysis shows the development of multiple agencies and a multi-scalar nature of collective place leadership in a cross-border mega-city region along with long-term economic dynamism of the place making.
(498 words)

Authors

• Tatiana Fumasoli, University College London UCL

• Fumi Kitagawa, University of Birmingham