ABSTRACT
In the field of industrial and redistributive regional policy, the centralizing State model leads to inexpert regulation. Inexpert regulation and uncoordinated State programmes across policy fields make the redistributive aims of regional policy uncertain. The competence of the State’s regulation of industrial and regional economic challenges is increasingly being called into questioned through theoretical and empirical arguments. The needs of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly came into political focus as, in the 1970s, governments began to view SMEs as job generators in otherwise weary Western economies. The problems of political and administrative accountability created by intermediaries are indeed real, if not necessarily problematic for SMEs. But the adherents of ‘order by central government’ cannot really avoid this ‘partial anarchy’. The need for local intermediaries is a necessary result of the political ambitions of the centralizing State model. To have sustained local strategies of development evolve democratic accountability will have to be organized more clearly by local government.
