ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a core of relevant literature in order to assess the emergence of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) during the 1990s as facilitators of local economic development, and how this was approached through the creation of local networks. Despite the upbeat message promoted by the Department for Education and Employment, other evidence of the effectiveness of TEC network policies suggested that they faced a number of constraints in reaching their key target market - small firms. A criticism of local-networks policy is that efforts to enhance local capacity have little relevance to national competitiveness. The emphasis throughout the guidance was that TECs should form networks and partnerships with local institutions, from both the public and private sector, to ‘broker’ innovation and best practice activities for growth into local firms, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises. In general, TECs established a dual, but overlapping, capacity in their networked approach to economic development.
