Do you want to be great at economic development? stop dreaming and start delivering

Power, money and responsibility for growth are moving to mayors, strategic authorities and councils. This book asks whether the institutions receiving them can deliver – and sets out what they have to build to do so.

For forty years England has tried to close the gap between its prosperous and struggling places, and the map of prosperity still looks much as it did in the late 1970s. The ideas were rarely the problem. The machinery beneath them was.

So this book goes inside the building. How to understand how your economy got where it is, and what is actually causing its problems. How to discover what is attainable, instead of copying a list of priority sectors. How to have projects ready before the funding window opens, stop the weak ones before they start, and find out what worked. And the partnership, people, culture and leadership that decide whether any of it takes root.

The Practitioner’s Guide for Everyone Whose Work Shapes Places and Economies

Whether you work in planning, property, higher education, skills, government, or community development — the economic forces reshaping UK places are directly reshaping your work. And if you work in economic development itself, you’ve never had a handbook like this one.

The Local & Regional Economic Development Handbook is the comprehensive, honest, practitioner-authored guide to how local economies work, why economic development so often fails to deliver what it promises, and what those working in and around the field can do differently.