ABSTRACT
The topic of Local Economic Development (LED) and related concepts such as community economic development, self-help and self-reliance strategies appear to have received considerable attention from scholars. The rise in prominence of LED is the result of general changes in the nature of development strategies, the global economic crises of the 1970s, government related policies broadly referred to as Thatcherism, structural adjustment programmes in the South and modifications to the operation of capital. The term LED has attracted increasing attention and is being used to describe a wide-range of local level actions. Thereafter relevant literature on LED, development from ‘above’ and ‘below’ and ‘within’ is examined to broaden out the context of the study. One of the key results of the global changes and crises is that ‘local development activity has intensified dramatically’. This in turn has led to a focus in the literature on the notion of the locality and the local state.
