Damien Krichewsky, ScaleDynamIC: a research agenda for examining Scalar Restructuring Processes en India and China.

In both India and China, rescaling processes linked both to globalisation and internal political developments have enhanced the scope of subnational actors to shape the factors conditioning industrialisation. In China, subnational scales have become increasingly significant sites of economic regulation over the last few decades as provincial and municipal officials negotiate or claim greater autonomy for devising industrial policies. In India, political mobilisation at all spatial scales, and the advent of national coalition governments, has given regional political parties and State governments greater bargaining power vis-à-vis New Delhi, including for devising economic development policies. This aim of this paper is to briefly review the literature on this topic, and present the main research questions and methods for investigating, on the basis on a new Franco-German research project, ScaleDynamIC (2015-18). Whereas the increasing importance of subnational scales – in particular large cities and metropolitan regions – as engines of economic development has been observed and analysed extensively in Western contexts, this important phenomenon is under-studied and under-theorized in Asian contexts.