The main aim of this article is to provide a viable classification of local development policies and programmes by spelling out the essential elements of the local development approach (LDA) as they emerge from the literature, namely the existence of a territorial focus, the mobilisation of...

The social enterprise sector is attracting policy and academic interest internationally for its promise to meet development challenges across social and economic domains. This article discusses findings from applied research in Tasmania, Australia, that aimed to understand whether social...

Italy has been at the forefront in the implementation of place-based regional development strategies during the 2000s, and it constitutes therefore a privileged point of view to investigate the contents of the approach, its potentialities as well as its limitations. In light of those...

Incongruences generated since the democratic transition period have hindered local development actors and policies establishing a subsidiary relationship between the different tiers of Spanish administration. The economic crisis in Spain has further aggravated issues concerning funding and...

This article examines bulk sales of municipal property tax liens in the formerly industrial city of Waterbury, Connecticut, USA, in the 1990s, in order to explore the limits and contradictions of neoliberal local governance strategies. In the USA, cities and states create property tax liens by...

The decline of the regionalist era and introduction of localism has set a number of emerging issues for economic development at the local level. Amongst the spatial, organisational and functional challenges facing local government a prevalent one is re-engineering a local development trajectory...

Sustainable environments which offer greater efficiency, prosperity, and social equity can be delivered at differing levels of city scale, but to do so urban economics, urban design, and local governance need to be considered concurrently. To be effective, economic, employment, and wealth...

This article argues that the space created by the clearing away of the English regional ‘institutional architecture’ after 2010 allows local authorities, in particular, to consider new flexible place-based approaches to economic development not possible under the old system. In this...

Little has been written from the practitioner’s perspective about the discourses of localism permeating local planning practice. Even less has been written about the tangible local economic outputs of such planning initiatives legislated through the Localism Act (House of Commons, 2011)....

The concern of this article is with action at the local level to combat racial inequality in employment. It draws on the authors' evaluation of the ‘West Midlands Common Standard’, an innovative policy introduced by a consortium of West Midlands councils to ensure their contractors...