Gaining systemic insight to strengthen economic development initiatives. Drawing on systems thinking and complexity theories to improve developmental impact. This working paper provides a theoretical grounding for the work we have done in the last three years and will continue to do. We consider…
Revisiting the Hexagon of LED as a framework to strengthen LED initiatives. This document is targeted to trainers and facilitators that use the Hexagon of Local Economic Development (LED) to introduce LED concepts during training events. It is a reflection on the way that we use the Hexagon as a…
Systemic Competitiveness Revisited - Conclusions for Technical Assistance in Private Sector Development. This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of the evolution, key elements and underlying concepts of Systemic Competitiveness. Section 3 addresses the mesolevel and…
Addressing Red Tape at the Local Level: Options and Tools. Addressing red tape is an important building block of a local economic development (LED) initiative. LED practitioners in many locations started to realise this some time ago, and, in a convergent process, practitioners in Business…
The Local Business Environment and Local Economic Development: Comparing Approaches. Recent years have seen an increasing effort in developing and transformation countries to improve the business environment. The focus has mainly been at reducing red tape and improving the regulatory environment.…
Designing a Regional Development Agency: Options and Choices. The purpose of this paper is a practical one, we decided to go for an deductive approach, i.e. take proven concepts of economic and territorial development and outline the key choices, trade-offs and dilemmas involved in the design of…
Benchmarking Territorial Competitiveness. Competitiveness is a concept and a reality that is rapidly spreading throughout the world. Market logic is an increasingly widespread principle that affects not only all kinds of companies but also territories, whether they are cities, regions or entire…
How to Promote Clusters. Clusters are defined as a territorial agglomeration of closely related industries. Clusters mostly emerge due to historical coincidence. A typical sequence would go like this: Some person starts a garment operation. As the founder is competent and the market is growing, the…
Governance and Territorial Development - Policy, Politics and Polity in Local Economic Development. There is an imbalance in the discussion around local economic development. The predominant focus in the literature is around policy. To some extent, the issue of polity is addressed in the…
Regional Value Chain Initiatives: An Opportunity for the Application of the PACA-Approach. This paper contributes to the current discussion in the development community on options for value chain promotion. It specifically looks at regional value chains at the sub-national level, since this will…
