ABSTRACT
The increasing attention given to local economic development (LED) in recent years is due to the widely acknowledged problems of long term economic decline and unemployment in Western countries, and the exhaustion of markets for traditional, massively produced, commodities. In Britain, the rapid proliferation of local economic initiatives and development agencies has been partly due to the failure of traditional regional and industrial policy to alleviate economic decline and unemployment problems. Regime analysis has served as a paradigm for understanding urban politics and the variety of responses to economic restructuring in recent years. Due to the pluralistic nature of LED activities which involve multiple agencies with multiple objectives, it is interesting to explore the compatibility of their objectives. The capacity of local actors to mobilise local resources has been the central concern of those who are engaged in LED research.
