In May 2023, Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, announced a government inquiry into the newly established Teesside Freeport. The inquiry followed a series of controversies that had begun to attract national attention. Environmental campaigners and local residents raised concerns about dredging operations linked to the site and their possible connection to mass marine die-offs along the North East and North Yorkshire coasts. At the same time, investigative journalists were scrutinising the project’s governance, raising questions about land transfers, public-private partnerships and rather murky relationships between political actors, private developers and local security operators.

The inquiry ultimately concluded that although governance arrangements required strengthening, there was no evidence of wrongdoing. By that point, however, Teesside had become a focal point for wider debates about transparency and accountability in British politics.

Only a few months earlier I had started fieldwork in the Teesside Freeport locale as part of my ISRF Fellowship. During this time, I spoke with residents, journalists, activists, councillors and MPs. It quickly became clear that Teesside’s significance extended far beyond any single local controversy, prompting broader questions about how contemporary economic development is governed and where responsibility ultimately lies.

Geographies of zoning

As the flagship of the UK’s new freeport programme, Teesside is frequently presented as a model for regional renewal – a vast brownfield redevelopment site promising thousands of jobs in green energy and advanced manufacturing in a region profoundly affected by deindustrialisation and austerity. Politically, it offers a compelling narrative in support of “levelling up,” the transformation of economic decline into opportunity, championed by local lad and Tory Mayor Ben Houchen.

The Teesside story of zoning is not unique. Across the world, governments have increasingly embraced similar initiatives as instruments of development, and the use of zones has proliferated and diversified at a remarkable speed. Zones take many forms — freeports, special economic zones, free trade zones, export processing zones, enterprise zones and investment zones — and vary widely in both scale and purpose. Some function as logistics hubs or manufacturing centres, while others operate as financial enclaves or specialised storage spaces. What they share, however, is a common logic: the selective modification of regulatory, fiscal and administrative arrangements to attract investment and accelerate growth.

Advocates present such zones as pragmatic solutions to economic stagnation. By reducing barriers to investment, streamlining decision-making and creating favourable business environments, they are expected to increase competitiveness and create jobs. In practice, however, their effects are often more complex. Research across different contexts has repeatedly linked zones to recurring governance challenges, including opacity, fragmented oversight, blurred public-private responsibilities and persistent accountability deficits. When wrongdoing does occur in a zone, responsibility can be difficult to locate.

My own interest in zones long predates the UK freeport programme. As a criminologist, I am interested in how rules are created, applied, circumvented and reorganised. Much of my earlier research focused on illicit trade, tracing the movement of pharmaceuticals, tobacco products, cocaine and consumer goods through global supply chains. Time and again, zones appeared as important nodes in these networks. As our research team examined counterfeit medicines passing through Dubai’s Jebel Ali Free Zone or drugs moving through Angolan SEZs, the same pattern emerged. These were not simply places where goods moved. They were places where governance itself operated in a different mode to produce criminogenic environments.

This observation challenges the common understanding of zones. They are often described as archetypal spaces of deregulation or exception, territories where ordinary rules are suspended. There is some truth in this characterisation, but it is also misleading. Zones are rarely lawless, nor are they simply weakly governed. Rather, they are governed through overlapping legal, administrative and contractual arrangements that create complex institutional environments. The issue, then, is not the absence of rules, but their reorganisation.

Scholars have described zones as hybrid institutional forms, what Jonathan Bach neatly coined as “nested exceptionalisms” operating across political and economic orders. Yet we still know relatively little about how these arrangements are established and stabilised in practice, or how they act as generative contexts for harm across various jurisdictions. Clarifying this distinction between deregulation and what might better be understood as rule-shifting is essential if we are to grasp the expanding geography of zoning in the global economy.

UK freeports and the state

This is an argument I develop in my ISRF report, which presents some of the data and analysis from Teesside. Freeports, I argue, are best understood not simply as sites of deregulation, but as sites of rule-shifting. Harm rarely arises simply because regulation disappears or enforcement weakens. Often it emerges where authority becomes fragmented, responsibilities become unclear and accountability becomes difficult to trace. More importantly, these governance arrangements do not operate in isolation. Their effects are shaped through interaction with broader political, economic and institutional conditions, as well as the histories, capacities and inequalities of the places in which they are embedded. UK freeports provide a useful illustration. Positioned as a cornerstone of post-Brexit industrial strategy, they combine customs incentives, tax reliefs, planning flexibilities and devolved governance arrangements. Their institutional structures bring together central government departments, local authorities, mayoral development corporations, private developers, port operators and investment partners.

From a technocratic perspective, these arrangements are presented as efficient solutions to administrative friction. They promise to accelerate development and coordinate investment more effectively. However, they also redistribute authority. Decision-making is dispersed across multiple actors and institutions, while accountability becomes layered, complex and at times opaque. Regulatory change occurs not through wholesale deregulation, but through selective regulatory reconfiguration. The result is not a governance vacuum, but a landscape characterised by a patchwork of layered governance structures.

This points to a broader paradox. Freeports are often framed as spaces of economic freedom, liberated from bureaucracy and excessive regulation. Yet this ‘freedom’ depends on extensive altered forms of state intervention. Their operation requires legislation, planning reform, infrastructure provision, public subsidy and complex governance architectures. In this respect, Daniela Gabor’s concept of the “derisking state” is particularly useful. Contemporary states increasingly intervene not by withdrawing from markets, but by actively reducing risks for private investment through institutional redesign and financial support. Freeports exemplify this tendency. They appear to reduce state involvement while in practice they intensify specific forms of state activity. The question, therefore, is not whether the state is present, but what kind of state is being constructed.

A new normal?

It is in this context that I have begun to think about zones as renormative spaces, a concept I introduce and develop in my forthcoming book The Freeport Paradox. As zones proliferate across the global economy, their exceptional form increasingly risks becoming the norm. Renormative spaces do not simply exist outside established systems; they actively remake them. They establish new norms and practices around accountability, transparency, development and the allocation of risk.

From a criminological perspective, this shift matters because harm is not produced solely by illegal activity. It can also emerge through institutional arrangements that diffuse responsibility, normalise opacity and unevenly distribute opportunities and risks. Zoning initiatives therefore matter not only because they may create opportunities for wrongdoing, but also because they reshape the conditions under which harm becomes visible, attributable and governable in the first place.

Teesside Freeport is not simply a story about legal innovation or economic restructuring. It is equally a story about how these changes are experienced by communities through altered livelihoods, contested environments, shifting democratic expectations, and changing relationships between citizens, the state and capital. Legal and governance dynamics cannot be disentangled from their social and ethical consequences. As zoning continues apace, we must ask what kinds of futures we are designing: whose interests they serve, who benefits, who bears the costs, and what we are losing along the way.