“Local Economic Development can only be effective if all actors work in partnership.” Consider the arguments for and against this statement.
Introduction
With the ongoing discussions on universal development for all for sustainable economic growth, countries and regional bodies are focusing on the drivers for local growth within the different economic spheres. An important group for driving growth is local actors as one of the key stakeholders in this process.
Ideally these partners should come from the government, private sector, civil society and community groups. This is to enable inclusion of all stakeholders involved and for collective responsibility. Governments mainly have been under pressure to build or realign institutions to function at local level and to create policies for their stakeholders that are inclusive. For the developed countries, focus is on allowing for bottom-up approaches like the Enterprise Zones and Local Enterprise Partnerships while for developing countries with large informal economies and weak institutions, the approaches vary partly due to failed policies in the past and the slow economic growth. On the international scale, development organisations have been tasked with coming up with better ways of dealing with particular regions characteristics to avoid the ‘one size fits all’ approach that previously existed. This has been deemed to be a more effective way of achieving sustainable growth. (UN Habitat, 2009) However the issue around how effective this is and its measurement still remains an enormous uphill task for these partnerships. This has been difficult also due to the fact that in every aspect of development plans, partner countries and organisations are being required, alongside ending poverty and promoting prosperity, to include protection of the environment for future generations.
In this essay I will define what