ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we revisit the classic question of why community strategy is so hard, why so many ambitions for planning, development, economic diversification, transition and reinvention stumble. We distinguish between tripping over realities, observed and unobserved, and tripping over the Lacanian Real, always unobserved. We discuss the importance of fantasy in policy and the risk of missing internal or external manifestations of the Real in assessing what is reality and what might be realistic futures for a resource community. We add the Lacanian concepts of the Master Signifier and objet petit a, and the idea of productive fictions to our conceptual repertoire, as they can be useful, we argue, in the process of self-analysis a community might undertake to make space for a new interpretation of self – where master signifiers have to be deconstructed, fantasies traversed and fictions assessed regarding their productivity.
