The capacity-building benefits for urban governance of unsuccessfully bidding for large events are often asserted, but much more rarely demonstrated. With the cost of bidding for an Olympics now running at US 25 million, we seek to address this gulf by asking whether the trend for...

With innovation increasingly important to economic development, innovation policy is attracting attention from politicians and policy-makers at all levels. Regional policy-makers face a distinctive challenge in that innovation takes place in international networks reaching far beyond their...

Social innovation is once more an increasingly popular notion circulating as an apparent means to solve the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century. But this common-sense idea of social innovation is based on a quasi-concept, where processes of innovation are absent. To restore some academic rigour...

Social innovation is once more an increasingly popular notion circulating as an apparent means to solve the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century. But this common-sense idea of social innovation is based on a quasi-concept, where processes of innovation are absent. To restore some academic rigour...

The English Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were established in April 1999 as part of the wider package of devolution measures. One of the first tasks undertaken by the RDAs was the preparation of Regional Economic Strategies (RESs). These strategies were intended to be a means of securing...

In this paper, we examine how devolution has affected local sustainable development. We focus on attempting to gauge how devolution will affect the promotion of sustainable development in the English regions through an analysis of the changes to date in Scotland, Wales and London. This...

Cluster policies have become an increasingly important component of the European Structural Funds, and are likely to become more so as cost pressures on these policies increase with European enlargement. However, the policy appeal of clusters is based on a range of factors, not merely their low...

Cluster policies have become an increasingly important component of the European Structural Funds, and are likely to become more so as cost pressures on these policies increase with European enlargement. However, the policy appeal of clusters is based on a range of factors, not merely their low...

Recent work in regional development has stressed the role of key economic actors in less favoured regions, particularly in high-technology sectors, in making those regions more attractive to outside investors. Of course, in less favoured regions (LFRs), there are rarely strong high-technology...

Although there is great interest in the new knowledge economy, less favoured regions seem permanently disadvantaged because they lack a critical mass of knowledge capital to initiate accumulation, growth and economic development processes. This is a problem for policy-makers seeking to promote...