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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 Enabling Environment (BEE) projects working at national level, have begun to notice that changing rules and regulations at national level is not sufficient, since it is at the local level that the public sector interacts with the private sec-tor on a day-to-day basis. Against this background, the question arises as to what is the most promising approach to address red tape at the local level.

We argue that there are four fundamentally different constellations that re-quire different intervention approaches. Two factors shape the setting of a local red tape inter-vention: The experience of local stakeholders with prior local development interventions, including the degree of trust that exists among key local players, and the credibility of the external actor (e.g. a technical assistance project) that is promoting or supporting the red tape intervention. We outline what we regard as the most promising intervention approaches for each of the four constellations. Our argument is based on experience in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Vietnam.