ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter raised three reasons why leadership needs to be studied and conceptually developed in the context of sustainable regional development. We stressed that there is a lack of studies focusing on leadership in this context, that the new forms of governance call for leaders to produce results in an ever more complex environment and that there is a mismatch between policy recommendations for sustainability and knowledge of how to deliver change. Therefore, our position is twofold. First, we see a need to investigate in more depth what influential actors in cooperation with the main stakeholders actually do to transform and reinvent their regions. Therefore, the main proposition of this book is that a deeper understanding of leadership might provide us with additional analytical leverage to understand and better explain how to truly construct sustainable regions. Second, all the local and regional champions, who invest time and energy in efforts to reinvent their regions, need and deserve better informed theories and models on how to lead and direct complex networks and governance systems for sustainable regional development.
