Unions and regional governance: the case of North West Tasmania, Australia

Unions have a distanced relationship from the practice of regional governance. Studies of regional governance tend to focus on the role of the state in combination with politically and economically dominant interest groups. In these analyses, and in practice, unions and their members are at best marginal and often absent. The argument presented in this study is that to understand the relative absence of unions, it is necessary to consider the forms and processes of regional governance and the capacities of unions to engage. These themes are addressed with reference to the North West Tasmania region in Australia.