a third analytical dimension, thosemacro-structural and macro-regulatory forces that shape the evolving ‘rules of the game’. These include large-scale institutional ensembles, financial systems and monetaryarrangements, and international organizations that variously frame, formulate, financeand sometimes even fulfill policy programs across diverse sites. The resulting rules of thegame impose powerful constraints on the scope of policy innovation and the repertoiresof realistic (and, indeed, imaginable) policy change, which in the wake of the financialcrisis have gravitated towards especially austere and instrumental rationalitiesn :downloading of regulatory, socioeconomic and environmental risks; devolution anddumping of financial obligations; and further retrenchment of social-state commitments.They are also embodied in the dull compulsion of supra-local competitive pressures andtechniques of fiscal discipline, which in turn shape the conditions of possibility forpolicymaking at the urban scale, and which effectively establish the operational,discursive and perceptive parameters of this process