SEVEN LESSONS FOR PLACE-BASED POLICY
Earlier this month I had the opportunity – alongside my colleagues, Dr Fiona McKenzie of RMIT University and Dr Jiri Blažek of Charles University, Prague – to run a workshop on place-based policy with EU officials in Brussels. The workshop led to a great deal of discussion and debate amongst the participants – academics and policy makers alike – and reinforced my sense that place-based policy is an increasingly important ‘tool’ in the suite of policies and programs used by governments as they seek to promote the development of their cities, communities and regions.
Over the past 20 years there has been a notable increase in the take up of place-based policies around the globe. These policies focus on meeting the holistic needs of individual places and recognise that needs vary from community to community regardless of whether they are a small rural township or a large urban area. Place-based policies seek to meet local needs, but also attempt to provide long term solutions by mobilising the resources already on the ground to drive development. They commonly implement actions that set out to improve the quality of the workforce, increase educational attainment and promote innovation. Locally-owned strategies are often a core feature of place-based policies, and they also look to local institutions, such as regional development bodies or Chambers of Commerce, to set priorities and secure community buy in.
In many ways it is relatively simple to describe what place-based policy seeks to do and the sorts of mechanisms it uses to achieve its goals. It is, however, much harder to nail down what place-based policy is and is not. Recent work, Rainnie et al (2018) helps provide some clarity around this issue and provides guidelines for students, policy makers and practitioners as they look to understand and implement place-based policies.
Lesson 1: Place based policies have a focus on value creation and the capture of value
As recent work by David Bailey and his colleagues has noted, (Bailey et al 2018) regions need to shape their economic future in order to secure their long-term wellbeing. Some of the steps they need to take to achieve this ambition include:
diagnosing their current and future competitive advantages;
identifying key ‘vehicles’ for delivering growth – such as FDI or incoming multi-national firms as ‘anchor’ tenants;
implementation of a positioning and branding strategy;
moving to occupy a specialised position in global production chains; and,
focussing on SMEs to ensure a fair distribution of the impacts of policy intervention.
Lesson 2: Place-based programs acknowledge the need to consider the performance and future of places over a long timeframe.
The challenges confronting cities and regions are often both profound and complex, which means that simple or short-term solutions are not available. Place-based policies implicitly accept this fact, while at the same time including a process for goal setting that is both flexible and accountable.
Lesson 3: Effective policies for addressing community disadvantage accept that there is an emotional dimension to structural change.
Giving communities the opportunity to voice their feelings and perspectives, while acknowledging the ‘sense of place’ individuals feel, can serve as a powerful call to action. At the same time, failing to recognize this emotional element brings with it the risk of alienating the community and key stakeholders.
Lesson 4: Place-based policies have – by definition – a focus on place, where place can be identified at a variety of spatial scales and in a number of ways. Importantly, ‘places’ should be entities to which affected individuals and enterprises feel a sense of belonging and inclusion.
Lesson 5: Place-based policies are an important tool for targeting assistance to those groups for whom adjustment processes are most challenging. Place-based policies have an explicit social justice or social inclusion dimension, and seek to improve wellbeing by addressing gaps in the community as a whole – the strength of local labour markets, education and training shortfalls etc.
Lesson 6: Place-based policies have a focus on governance.
Local decision making is critical to achieving the aspirations of place-based policies. Centralised approaches are fundamentally not place-based policies or programs; conversely, many central governments implement place-based policies by enabling local decision making and priority setting.
Lesson 7: An engagement with local institutions is a core feature of place-based policy.
This dialogue assists in building trust as a city, region or community undergoes change, and creates a ‘democratic dividend’ to advance the process of economic and social adjustment.
These seven lessons help all of us better understand place-based policies and, ultimately, deliver superior outcomes for those communities we aim to assist. They are not the only tool or strategy available to cities, regions and communities undergoing change, but they can be an important one, and they can form a platform through which central government policies can best assist places undergoing adverse change.