ABSTRACT
During the 1980s there was considerable academic and political debate about the extent to which and the circumstances within which localities could determine their own developmental trajectories in a rapidly changing and increasingly volatile globalized economy. There were those who were optimistic about the possibilities of local self-determination (see, for example, Cooke, 1990). Equally, there were those who were much more sceptical as to the extent to which this both would and could be possible, especially for those localities that were already marginal to the main currents of the accumulation process (see, for example, Hudson and Plum, 1986; Beynon and Hudson, 1993). Beyond this, there are a series of questions relating to cultural and political – as opposed to some narrow view of economic – change that are related to, but ought not to be reduced to, those of change in the economy and its determinants.
