ABSTRACT
The role of the state in sponsoring industrialisation can be traced back to the nineteenth century and beyond. Such intervention in the economy was frequently a means of nationbuilding. Since the Second World War governments have intervened in their economies to ensure local and regional development, often reflecting a commitment to limit the growth of inter-regional disparities and promote the development of rural areas. Although having some success in shaping patterns of local and regional development, as we noted in Chapter 1, centralised or top-down forms of intervention, pursued by national planning and development authorities, were criticised for their heavy concentration on the provision of physical infrastructure and, as we shall consider in Chapter 6, an overemphasis on the attraction of mobile investment. Such an approach often failed to close the development gaps between prosperous and lagging regions. The perceived failure of such approaches, together with the challenges of globalisation, has led to a growing emphasis upon bottom-up approaches to the promotion of local and regional development. Such interventions, in theory at least, tend to require strong institutions of local and regional governance and to be based on local and regional participation and dialogue. As we discussed in Chapter 1, bottom-up approaches are concerned with integrated territorial development, focusing upon the mobilisation of local resources and competitive advantages that are locally owned and managed.
