ABSTRACT
State development policies are usually presented as technically rational plans of action which offer the best means to achieve defined objectives. The argument of the first part of this book suggests that common regional policy objectives can only be understood in political terms. But this does not imply that planning interventions designed to achieve political objectives can have no technical rationality. And the planner who is given the task of promoting more ‘desirable’ spatial distributions of economic activity, population and income – no matter what the justification for that task – can find within regional development theory the scientific bases for a number of courses of action. This second section of the book examines the theoretical underpinnings of some rival regional planning strategies which have been suggested within the literature as ways of achieving regional development objectives.
