ABSTRACT
One of the more influential critical articles on the theory of economic development practice can be attributed to the planning theorist Robert Beauregard. In a book chapter in Theories of Local Economic Development, Beauregard (1993, 267) sought to ‘expose the constitutive rules of economic development as practised in the United States’ by governments and not-for-profit organisations. He did so by considering the boundaries and categories of useful ideas, conventions and knowledges then deployed in economic development practice. This chapter suggests that these identified boundaries and categories are insightful as to what they then contained, and some fifteen years on, what they did not then consider, for understanding contemporary economic development policy and practice.
