The future of local economic strategies

Perhaps what is most remarkable in writing about the future of local economic strategies is that it is possible to do so at all. Not so long ago it would have been virtually impossible to identify anything which could have been described as a local economic strategy, if that is understood to imply a more or less integrated set of initiatives directed towards the achievement of relatively clear goals. Local authorities have been involved in economic promotion and industrial development throughout the century. But these activities could only be seen as making up "strategies " or being part of wider "strategies " on a very charitable interpretation of what that might mean, for example in the context of the Bains Report's bland claims that, "Local government is concerned with the overall economic, cultural and physical well-being of the community " (Study Group on Local Authority Management, 1972, 122). There was a massive expansion of local authority economic development work across the board throughout the 1970s, to the extent that the DoE