ABSTRACT
Indigenous development is based upon the naturally occurring sources of economic potential growing from within localities and regions. Indigenous approaches are a means of nurturing ‘home-grown’ assets and resources that may be more locally and regionally embedded, perhaps more committed and less willing to divest, and more capable of making enduring and sustainable contributions to local and regional development. Strategies of indigenous local and regional development may seek to make places less dependent upon exogenous or external economic interests. Indigenous interventions connect directly to the bottom-up approach detailed in the Introduction in Chapter 1. They seek to work with existing assets and resources from the ground up to explore and unleash their potential for local and regional development. Beyond the superficial attractions of lower cost factors of production such as land and labour, traditional top-down and centralised approaches often overlooked or ignored the assets and resources deeply embedded in localities and regions. In the context of the heightened globalisation discussed in Chapter 1, the enhanced mobility of factors of production has arguably increased the significance of indigenous strategies that recognise the importance of places and their embedded characteristics. If capital and labour can, in theory, locate anywhere across the globe each may become more sensitive to differences in assets and resources between places.
