In the pursuit of economic growth drivers and inhibitors of place based partnerships.pdf (531.76 kB)
In the pursuit of economic growth: drivers and inhibitors of place-based partnerships
In the pursuit of economic growth, England has historically retained a level of centralized control despite
policy attempts to decentralize. Consequently, attempts to create a subnational tier have struggled to
establish a durable alternative. Reporting on the episode of localism, which began in 2010 and has
involved the abolition of regional development agencies (RDAs) in favour of 38 voluntary local enterprise
partnerships (LEPs) alongside the construction of a growing number of combined authorities, the
research investigates a complex place-based economic landscape whereby the provision of guidance and
sharing of practice in England remains limited. This paper draws on the existing literature to propose a
conceptual model of place-based partnership that formed a scaffold for an empirical study involving 10
LEPs in the Midlands. A soft systems methodology was adopted to understand the factors that help and
hinder these place-based partnerships. The paper advances the argument that the persistence of
centralism limits the LEPs’ capacity to fill the missing space and observes a strong influence of central
government and reliance on local government. Beyond the LEPs, given the global trend of
decentralization, further research into the interplay between the factors in the conceptual model is
encouraged to support the development of place-based partnerships as they work towards securing
collaborative advantage
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Regional Studies, Regional ScienceVolume
5Issue
1Pages
332 - 338Citation
BROADHURST, K., 2018. In the pursuit of economic growth: drivers and inhibitors of place-based partnerships. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 5(1), pp. 332 - 338.Publisher
© the Author. Published by Taylor and FrancisVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-09-26Publication date
2018-10-23Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/eISSN
2168-1376Publisher version
Language
- en