‘Left behind places’: What can be done about them?

Introduction: towards a new policy discourse?

The previous issue of this journal focussed on the definition, identification and explanation of what, in a range of countries, have become termed ‘left behind places’, those geographical areas, at a variety of spatial scales, that have failed to share in the economic growth and development of recent decades and have lagged in economic performance, prosperity, opportunity and welfare. At the same time, localities, regions and cities across the world face unprecedented challenges and uncertain situations in the wake of the momentous disruptions of the last decade and a half, including the global financial crisis and the COVID pandemic, and the upheavals that will unfold in the coming decades due to climate change and the march of artificial intelligence. Specific national settings face their own combinations of such problems.

In this second issue of the journal on the theme of ‘left behind places’, the focus is extended to the question of what to do about them, in terms of what sort of policies are likely to improve their economic prospects, developmental paths and resilience. The policy challenge is considerable and complex. It is considerable because many countries have had a long history of regional policies aimed at reducing the economic inequalities between more prosperous places and less prosperous ones. Yet those policies have not succeeded in reducing those disparities: to the contrary, since around the early 1980s regional economic inequalities have increased. This suggests that past policy models are not adequate or have become outmoded and that new policy models are needed. It is complex because ‘left behind places’ themselves vary in the specific nature of their economic and social problems. There are different types of ‘left behind places’ (see MacKinnon, 2022) and thus require different sorts of policies: there can be no ‘one size fits all’ policy response.

Over the past two decades, state policies have, at times, departed—at least temporally—from the neoliberal, market-based political economic model that developed in many countries from the early 1980s onwards (and which itself played no small part in causing the global financial crisis). Two periods stand out in this regard. The historic global shocks of the financial crisis and COVID pandemic both triggered states to intervene, economically, socially and materially on a massive scale, with unprecedented increases in spending, first to bail out the banks and then to support businesses and workers during the lockdowns imposed during the pandemic. These fiscal injections were then followed in several cases by subsequent periods of ‘fiscal consolidation’, that is austerity, as states sought to rein back public debt by cutting expenditure, in real and absolute terms, on public and social services, the brunt of which cuts have fallen particularly on ‘left behind places’, adding to their predicament.

Yet, the dramatic increases in state intervention and fiscal stimulus associated with these two historic shocks have stimulated calls for yet further large-scale state intervention to support economic, social and environmental recovery, to ‘build back better’, and to reconstruct national economies in fairer, more inclusive and greener ways. Thus, the United States’ Build Back Better Agenda (2021), the UK’s Build Back Better: Our Plan for Growth (2021), the OECD’s Building Back Better: A Sustainable, Resilient Recovery after COVID-19 (2020), the European Union’s Recovery Plan for Europe (2020) and the World Economic Forum’s To Build Back Better, We Must Reinvent Capitalism (2020), all embody this ideal, even if they differ in specific focus and in the scale of resources to be devoted to the task. The immediate question that arises is: how can these political clarion calls be used to reduce regional inequalities, to ‘level up’ the myriad of ‘left behind places?’ While there is an explicit recognition that ‘building back’ will need to address the problems of ‘left behind’ places, how that recognition is translated into actual policy interventions is a pressing issue.

Germane to this question is the increasing prominence within both the academic community and in policymaking circles, of the notion of ‘place-based policy’, the idea that in the light of the failures and disappointing impact of previous regional policies, future policy must be much more spatially targeted and differentiated, as well as spatially devolved to individual localities themselves. Appealing though such arguments are, the notion of ‘place-based policy’ is not unproblematic. For one thing, there is no single agreed definition of what ‘place-based policy’ actually means: different advocates of the idea use it to mean different things and to argue for intervention at different scales. For another, to the extent that it implies the devolution of policy design and implementation to localities themselves, the capacities and capabilities of local areas vary enormously. The reality is that it is likely to be the more prosperous areas that have those capacities and capabilities, not disadvantaged ‘left behind places’, so the outcome may well be a sort of ‘inverse care law’, whereby those areas most in need of policy funding to revive their economies could end up being the least supported.

What is clear is that we are at a critical juncture in spatial policy thinking and practice regarding how best to resolve the problem of ‘left behind places’. In the remainder of this article, we examine this issue and interrogate how likely the various policy programmes being implemented in the USA, UK and Europe are to achieve the ‘levelling up’ of ‘left behind places’ that is so desperately needed. Our discussion proceeds in three sections. First, we discuss the underlying rationale for current policy intervention across nations, drawing on evidence from the examples of the UK, USA and EU, respectively. In the second part, we then provide a brief overview of how policy has evolved mainly in the post-second World War period in the UK, the USA and the European Union. The third section the considers the lessons that have been learned about how to deliver policies so that they achieve the desired outcomes and, thus, the key messages that policy makers should take on board as they seek to deliver new policies in the future. We focus particularly on the experience of the UK, East and West German unification, the USA and European Cohesion Policy.

The rationale for policies to revive left behind places

The rationale for policies to address ‘left behind’ places crosscuts nations as many face similar challenges that ultimately stem from the nature of capitalism in creating uneven development. As noted in the first CJRES issue of ‘left behind places’ (Fiorentino et al., 2024), the widening of regional disparities and the predicament of left behind places can be attributed to the effects of globalisation, the rise of new global competitors (especially China), financialization and the neoliberal policies of states themselves. Such macro-level shifts have combined with the socio-political and economic history of regions and localities within nations to leave some places more disenfranchised than others from the benefits of economic development. Beyond the need to revive national economies, a concern with equity and social welfare is paramount, an issue also discussed previously (Fiorentino et al., 2024). While the need for policies to address ‘left behind’ places span many nations, it also varies by country, based on the degree to which the state and other institutions have historically ensured equity and social welfare across places and populations. Finally, behind any rationale for policy lies the question of political will to implement it. Any calls for fundamental reform must come to terms with the political impetus to reduce inequality within nations and pushback by vested interests.

In this section, we address the issues of lagging economies, equity and social welfare, and political will. Then we turn to the rationale for policy interventions specific to the UK, USA and EU.

Economic issues

The persistence of ‘left behind’ places is inseparable from broader problems of uneven development within nations with its current manifestations identified in a variety of studies (see, for example, Evenhuis et al., 2021; Fiorentino et al., 2024; Martin et al., 2021; Sandbu, 2020). From an economic standpoint, these problems, though nationally varied, generally include the benefits of productivity growth that have failed to filter down to workers over the decades, more recent slowdowns in productivity, lack of good jobs, ever-rising income and wealth inequality, and growing regional inequality. For far too long, these problems have been addressed by governments through what Hacker and Loewentheil (2012) call an ‘austerity economics’ approach, involving tax cuts for the rich, reduction of regulations, and policies that regard spending and deficits as a nation’s greatest threat. This austerity approach has been also extremely regionally uneven (Gray and Barford 2018). And as Sandbu (2020:99) notes ‘For a very long time, it has been conventional wisdom that inequality is the price you pay for faster growth and that high wages discourage investment and productivity’. With the neoliberal policy approach long in use in many nations, albeit with some periodic departures, the chickens came home to roost. Masses of people have been disenfranchised from the benefits of economic development with places left behind and the rise of geographies of social and political discontent, including extreme right populism (Rodriguez Pose, 2018; Sandbu, 2020). In keeping with a neoliberal policy stance, the conventional approach to ‘left behind’ places is to call for workers and families to sacrifice even more, including moving away from their home communities, and to offer policies that tinker around the margins and fail to reduce societal inequality while rewarding the wealthy with lower taxes. As discussed by Dijkstra (2024), the World Bank, for example, has argued for allowing places to empty out over time and advocated against public policies that might counteract demographic change.

The foremost rationale for policies to address ‘left behind’ places is to revive their lagging and disadvantaged economies and improve their job opportunities and wages, to bring their per capita incomes closer to those found in the places that have pulled ahead. The need for appropriate policies has become more immediate and critical over time. As we discussed in the first CJRES issue of ‘Left Behind’ Places (Fiorentino et al., 2024), this concern is widespread, where places in many nations have failed to experience the better economic conditions that other places have enjoyed. In addition, recurring major economic shocks have tended to impact more severely on already left behind places, thereby widening geographical inequalities yet further (see Fiorentino et al., 2024). Places ‘left behind’ mean that localities’ economic potential is not being fully developed and realised, so local populations suffer in terms of wages, employment opportunities, and standards of living while national economic performance overall is held back. Finally, the longer the wait for serious action from the state, the more spatial disparities are likely to grow and become entrenched, and the more difficult managing the macro-economy will be.

To counter the persistence of ‘left behind’ places, it can’t be ‘business as usual’. Governments must embark on sweeping changes that rectify problems allowed too long to fester. The need for a fundamental shift in approaches is increasingly recognised in academic and policy circles and become the opinion of many analysts offering broad-based policy prescriptions that often overlap. For example, Hacker and Loewentheil (2012) have put forth a manifesto for ‘prosperity economics’ that rests on three pillars of reforms to ensure broadly shared well-being. The first pillar is growth. Here, they advocate policies to create dynamic, innovation-led growth that will continue over the long term by investing in people, and expanding opportunity, inclusivity and productivity to ensure good jobs and rising wages. The second pillar is security, policies that ensure economic, environmental and fiscal security. Policies for economic security aim to increase earnings, reduce the precarity of employment, provide better retirement security, and improve health and general well-being. With financial security, Hacker and Loewentheil (2012) argue that people can attain stability that facilitates civic engagement and builds social capital. Economic security can also inspire greater trust in government and/or push government to a greater degree to protect workers, families, the environment and public finances. Policies for environmental security identify new actions to deal with climate and natural resources and to create more sustainable economies. Policies for fiscal security aim to support public investment and safeguard the population’s economic security, including broadening fairness and sources of tax revenue. The third pillar is ‘a democracy that works’, policy reforms that instil greater accountability and democratic values in the private and public sector, curtail the influence of the wealthiest people and most extreme partisans and check the power of special interests in politics.

With similar intent, Sandbu (2020) advances a wide-ranging policy agenda to establish an ‘economics of belonging’ where all social groups are integrated into national prosperity and places will not be left behind. A large part of this policy agenda centres on the need to correct power imbalances in the labour market and in the market for goods and services which includes curtailing the power of corporations. Other changes advocated involve macroeconomic policy and reforms in the financial and tax systems so that economic institutions work foremost to improve the lives of ordinary people. Sandbu (2020, p.114) further stresses the need for ‘an empowering welfare system’ and the importance of policies such as universal basic income. He also argues that policies are needed to (re)connect left-behind places to centres of economic activity and to allow them to become part of successful agglomerations (ibid, pp. 197–198). He further emphasises that the suite of policies advanced above are complementary and must be taken as a package to work together.

In sum, the overriding rationale for state intervention is to remediate the problems that have led to ‘left behind’ places as reflected in uneven development and disparities across populations and social groups. States should ensure well-being for all: shared growth, economic security, a good quality of life for workers and families, reduced economic inequality, environmentally sustainable growth and a democracy that works for everyone.

Equity and social welfare

In the first CJRES issue of ‘Left Behind’ Places, we discussed how economic conditions in left-behind places are linked to populations’ well-being along numerous dimensions of life, the quality of community institutions and services provided, and how where these languish, so the potential for political disengagement or extremism is increased (Fiorentino et al., 2024). A concern with equity and social welfare also underlays the need for policy intervention.

This rationale for policy intervention is more pressing in some countries, depending on their legacy of commitment to equity and social welfare. Nations have been classified into different policy regimes showing how some do a better job than others in fulfilling this commitment. For example, Esping-Andersen’s (1990) three-category classification of welfare states into liberal (e.g., Canada, the USA and the UK), conservative (e.g., France, Germany) and social democratic (e.g., Norway and Sweden) regimes have been widely influential. While this classification highlights the policy legacy of nation states, various critiques have noted that national differences have become more blurred over time (Deeming, 2017; Svallfors and Tyllström, 2019). Nevertheless, Sandbu (2020) argues that the social democratic model or Nordic model offers greater potential to elevate ‘left behind’ places (and people) as it has a legacy of ensuring egalitarian growth. In their ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach, Hall and Soskice (2001) classify market economies into two types: liberal market economies (e.g., Canada, the USA and the UK) and coordinated market economies (e.g., Germany, France and Japan). Liberal market economies produce high inequality, while coordinated economies have lower inequality, and employers tend to be more accepting of the welfare state. Ebner (2015) notes that liberal and coordinate market economics, in turn, vary regarding how subnational disparities become apparent. Nations also vary in their legacy of spatial Keynesianism, the degree to which central governments have been committed to reducing within-nation inequalities (Brenner, 2004; Cox, 2022; Martin and Sunley, 1997). Martin and Sunley (1997) explain that the centralised Keynesian model tended to create spatial socioeconomic integration and to be spatially redistributive and stabilising across regions. This state policy model, while more characteristic of Western Europe than the USA (Brenner, 2004; Cox, 2022), began to break down in the late-1970s. Historically, as Cox (2022) notes, the USA has been exceptional relative to France, the UK, and other Western nations in the lack of central government efforts to reduce inequality across regions and localities. The UK and France give stronger central support to local governments, while in the USA, local governments tend to be characterised by ‘fend-for-yourself’ federalism, engaged in territorial competition for jobs and employers in order to maintain their tax base and bureaucratic operations. It is telling that according to Pike et al. (2023), the first direct reference to ‘places left behind’ is found in an article by Fuguitt (1971) that identifies policy concerns about the fate of small, remote localities in rural America.

Researchers building from different national models of policy regimes and others recognise that policy domains are connected, and interventions can interact positively. For example, Sandbu (2020: 237) notes:

higher wage floors and better workplace rules will only improve productivity without lowering employment if a high-pressure economy encourages businesses to hire and there is good provision of education and retraining opportunities. […] And none of these things will reliably help the left behind without redirecting the tax system and regional policy in their favour. Tax or regional policies, meanwhile, will not do as much as they could in the absence of high demand pressure and incentives to increase productivity.

Policies to create sustainable economic growth and policies to reduce social and spatial inequality can be mutually reinforcing, as the Nordic case illustrates (Sandbu, 2020). There is no necessary trade-off between state interventions aimed at growth and equity. Indeed, the evidence points to the contrary, that countries that have lower social and spatial inequality tend to experience higher long-run rates of economic growth. Hendrickson et al. (2018) point out that equity won’t be achieved without development and that development itself can be jeopardised by excessive regional inequality. The degree to which both growth and redistribution goals can be met successfully varies by time and national context, as noted below in our discussion of different nations’ policies to address ‘left behind’ places. For example, the capacity of the state, governmental quality, degree of corruption, and legal traditions have affected the national and local results of the EU’s Cohesion Policy.

Finally, given the differences across nations in their legacy of ensuring equity and social welfare, what may appear to be transformative policy interventions in one nation may be rather routine in another.

Political will

Given that ‘left behind’ places and socio-spatial inequalities are longstanding, often entrenched, in many nations, a fundamental question is whether governments have the political will or determination to create change.¹ Political will, itself reflecting dominant political values and ideology, varies by nation and over time. Models of the welfare state demonstrate the possibility of creating more inclusive societies with still dynamic economies. In fact, the legitimacy of the Keynesian-welfare state model required measures to ensure that social and spatial inequalities were not allowed to increase unduly (see Martin and Sunley, 1997). Articles in the CJRES special issue on the State and the Covid Crisis demonstrate that historically when forced(though largely to salvage national economies) governments did act broadly and deeply to support the well-being of cities, states/provinces and populations (Gray et al., 2023).

Partisanship, political ideology and vested interests in nations reduce the political will to reduce regional inequalities. At the national level, there is probably no more vivid recent example in the USA than the large Republican opposition to Biden’s domestic spending packages. No Republican voted for Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which covered local governments’ COVID spending and helped them make up for long-term underfunding. Republicans along with two Democratic senators sank Biden’s full-blown Build Back Better Act, though the subsequent Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act incorporated some parts of the former legislation and passed with bipartisan support.

The problem of political will occurs not just at the national level but also at the local level. Duncan (2015), for example, illustrates this problem in the case of US rural localities in Appalachia and the South. Here, vested interests result in opportunity hoarding, where jobs and public services are controlled by local elites who do not want change. At the same time, it is essential to point out, as Eisenberg (2024) does in this special issue, that there may be quite a bit of progressive political action occurring in ‘left behind’ places. Still, it is underestimated by researchers and the media (Croft, 2024). Eisenberg (2024) argues that local people are not helpless and have struggled historically to improve community life.

On the other hand, the political will to reduce regional inequalities has been mustered by governments under different sets of circumstances, such as in the case of cementing political allegiance. The UK illustrates this point. There, in recent years, the Conservative Government has explicitly directed policy intervention at ‘left behind places’ to attract their electoral support. Many of the UK’s left-behind places, particularly old industrial cities, and towns in the country’s northern regions, have traditionally voted for the Labour Party (so-called Red Wall seats), and indeed have historically been Labour’s heartland areas. These same areas also voted strongly for Brexit in the referendum in 2016. The Conservative leader Boris Johnson’s promise to finally ‘get Brexit done’ was a key factor in his party’s successful capture of these seats in the General Election of 2019. In 2021, he launched his ‘levelling up’ promise in a blatant move to cement that political allegiance:

[T]oo many parts of this country have felt left behind. Neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis [London]. … this Government not only has a vision to change this for the better. We have a mission to unite and to level up… We will double down on levelling up. We will unleash the potential of the entire country… to mend the indefensible gap in opportunity and productivity and connectivity between the regions of the UK… We will not just bounce back. We will bounce forward – stronger and better and more united than ever before (Prime Minister Boris Johnson, 2021).

A year later, the Conservative Government published its Levelling Up White Paper (HM Government, 2022), arguably the most detailed policy programme for reviving left-behind places since the Distribution of Industry Act of 1945. There can be little doubt that part of the intention behind this programme is political, to extend the Conservative Party’s electoral base northwards beyond its traditional southern heartland. It is far from clear, however, whether this capture will remain secure.

Lastly, while policies aimed at modest, incremental change might seem a more successful route by which to overcome political resistance, authors such as Collier (2018) and Sandbu (2020) argue for much bolder action. Collier, for example, calls for a new ethical political economy, in which, among other things, the power of big cities over the rest of the economy would be substantially reduced, even reversed. As part of this new economics, he argues there is both an efficiency case and an equity case for taxing the gains from agglomeration. For Sandbu, comprehensive, large-scale programs such as a universal basic income and better taxation of capital, are the way forward: they are more difficult for opponents of reform to fight because opponents must engage on multiple fronts, and they increase the capacity for mobilising support from different constituencies. And even if large-scale comprehensive programs are defeated, their core principles have been released to the public gaze and can be used to leverage future policy.

How policy has evolved: evidence from the UK, the USA and the European Union

Levelling up left behind places in the UK

In the UK, a concern to achieve a more spatially balanced economy dates back to the 1920s, when several ‘distressed areas’ emerged with high unemployment, low wages and poverty that activated social unrest, and forced the Governments of the time to intervene via what were the first experiments in regional policy. Throughout the post-war years up to the early-1980s, the rationale for regional policy was primarily economic, to achieve a more geographically balanced distribution of manufacturing industry by diverting new investment activity from the more buoyant southern regions to what had become labelled as the Assisted Areas, which by the end of the 1970s had expanded to include 42 percent of the UK’s working population. In the 1980s, the Thatcher Governments rolled back this regional policy ‘map’ (to 24 percent of the working population) and substantially reduced spending on regional policy measures. It was also argued that an economic rationale for regional policy was ‘no longer self-evident’, and that instead, the case for intervention had become ‘principally a social one, to reduce, on a long-term basis, regional imbalances in employment opportunities’ (HM Government, 1983). Yet spatial economic inequalities continued to widen throughout the 1980s into the 1990s. Under the New Labour Government elected in 1997, regional policy entered another phase with the creation of Regional Development Agencies for all of the UK’s broad regions. For the first time, strategic regional economic development became a key goal of regional policy. But these new bodies were short-lived, being abolished in 2010 by the new Conservative-Liberal Democratic Coalition Government in favour of a system of Local Enterprise Partnerships across England. These in turn are now being phased out, and their economic development functions transferred to Local Government Authorities and the new Combined Authorities.

The Government’s Levelling Up White Paper (HM Government, 2022) arguably marks a major historical moment in this evolving and fluctuating history of policies intended to address the predicament of economically lagging places across the UK. Indeed, the very language to describe the problem of regional economic inequalities and the policy agenda of reducing those inequalities has changed. The explicit mention of addressing the ‘productivity gap’ between the UK regions is by no means incidental and marks a resurfacing of what in effect is an economic efficiency argument, and not just a social call, for regional policy. There has been considerable concern about the UK’s poor productivity record, especially since the global financial crisis, when productivity has all but flat-lined, and much debate has focussed on the causes of this poor growth. Politically, part of the accusative finger has pointed to the underperformance of many of Britain’s northern cities and towns, where labour productivity is often half of that in London. The Levelling Up White Paper (HM Government, 2022) interprets the problem of low productivity in the UK’s left behind places in terms of six fundamental drivers—six forms of ‘capital’ (human, financial, social, physical, intangible, institutional). Left behind places are seen as lacking in the quality or availability of one or more of these forms of capital, which results in their becoming caught in a vicious circle of low productivity, low prosperity, social deprivation and poor quality of life.

The Levelling Up White Paper (HM Government, 2022) sets out a series of policy ‘missions’ based on this interpretation of the left behind places problem, all of which, of themselves, seem reasonable enough. However, the policy does not go far enough (see, for example, Martin et al., 2022). There is a vagueness as to the targets of the levelling-up programme. For example, the various missions repeatedly state that by 2030, productivity, pay, education, skills and transport connectivity will have ‘improved everywhere’, ‘with the gap between the top performing and other areas closing’ (ibid, pp 120-121). This is hardly an explicit target for which the government can be held. The theory underpinning the ‘types of capital’ approach thus providing the foundation of the White Paper is insufficiently articulated. Key issues that are inadequately addressed are why the suggested forms of ‘capital’ have come to vary between different localities (the processes involved) and exactly how they interact locally to produce growth and development. The issue of how far and in what ways the development of the ‘capitals’ in left-behind places is shaped by broader processes and policies in the national economy, especially the concentration of economic, financial and political power in London, is not tackled. The funding to be devoted to ‘levelling up’ is far from easy to interpret and disentangle, as it includes several initiatives that already exist and others that are not spatially targeted at left-behind places as such. It is claimed that almost £90bn is to be devoted to levelling up over the 2022–25 period. However, some £23bn is for 40 new NHS hospitals, and £26bn is for public capital investments for the green industrial revolution, both agreed to before the levelling up agenda. Excluding these leaves around £40 billion, of which the Levelling Up Fund (£4.8bn), a Towns Fund (£2.4bn), and the Shared Prosperity Fund (£2.6bn) are the most prominent. Indeed, the government has now stated that it is committing £13 billion to levelling up, a figure much less than that contained in the White Paper. While the policy to decentralise specific policy and spending powers and responsibilities from central Government in London to some 12 new mayoral Combined Authorities, and its establishment of a new multi-departmental Government Economics Campus in the northern city of Darlington, are moves in the right direction, nonetheless, disillusionment has already set in with both the progress of levelling up and the inadequate resources devoted to it (Espiet-Kilty, 2022; Martin et al., 2021). Meanwhile, regional disparities in the UK have widened through the COVID crisis and are predicted to continue over the coming decade, notwithstanding the levelling-up programme.

The scale of both social and spatial inequalities has reached a point when the social and political coherence of the country is in question. The ‘elephant in the room’ that has long plagued regional policy in the UK is London’s overwhelming concentration of economic, corporate, financial and political power. As early as 1919, the prominent political geographer Sir Halford Mackinder had warned about the way that London sucks in human talent from the rest of the country and how national interests become dominated by that city:

As long as you allow a great metropolis to drain most of the best young brains from local communities, to cite only one aspect of what goes on, so long must organisations centre unduly in the metropolis and become inevitably an organisation of nation-wide interests and classes (Mackinder, 1919, pp. 131-132).

This view was echoed two decades later by the Barlow Commission, in its famous report on the geographical distribution of the nation’s industries:

The contribution in one area of such a large proportion of the national population as is contained in Greater London, and the attraction to the Metropolis of the best industrial, financial, commercial, and general ability, represents a serious drain on the rest of the country” (Barlow Commission, 1940, p.84).

And more recently, Paul Collier has voiced similar concerns:

The mighty productivity of today’s London grows out of advantages to which the whole nation has historically contributed… Yet today, the prosperity of London is tightly clasped in and around the metropolis: the rest of the country must feel as if it is living under not so much the ‘yoke of capital’ as the yoke of the capital. It is time to cast it off (Collier, 2018; emphasis added).

The neoliberal national policy regime followed by successive Governments over the past four and half decades, with its focus on marketisation, privatization, globalisation, deregulation and financialization has served to favour the economy of London (especially the City of London) and the surrounding southeast region to the detriment of much of the rest of the UK (Sunley and Martin, 2023). The financial crisis revealed only too starkly the folly of this overdependence on finance and London. In the decade following that crisis, the Government’s pursuit of ‘fiscal consolidation’, that is austerity, in the attempt to drive down the increase in public debt incurred by bailing out of the banking system, fell most severely on the least prosperous areas across the country (see Gray and Barford, 2018). Severe real cutbacks to the Government grants made to local authorities (estimated at around 30% or more over 2010–2019) have eroded several of the key social and community services those authorities are legally obliged to provide. In effect, the growing fiscal crisis of the local state in the UK is the price being paid for saving the banks. There is little in the new ‘levelling up’ programme that addresses this aspect of the problem of left-behind places.

While the UK’s Levelling Up White Paper provides a long-overdue opportunity to embark on a bold and radical policy programme and is potentially a useful starting point for constructing a new, more equitable economic geography, it remains disappointingly inadequate. After a century of regional policy, regional economic disparities are wider than ever, and social fragmentation and spatial inequalities are fuelling political disillusionment. Addressing the social and economic disadvantages of the UK’s left behind places could not be more urgent.

The ‘Build Back Better’ challenge in the USA

Left behind places in America are loosely identified as former cities and towns that lost jobs and equally numerous residents, starting in the 1980s and continuing into the third decade of the 21st century. America’s problems are not new (Newman, 1986). ‘Flyover places’ continue to suffer from job loss and population shrinkage. Today, ‘by one estimate, 2,100 counties lost 200,000 businesses between 2005 and 2015—and 1.2 million private sector jobs along with that. These urban, suburban, and rural areas are home to white, African American, Asian, Hispanic and Native American families. And they are leaking opportunity’ (Bhandari, 2019).

With the election of President Biden, members of the White House and federal government agencies are working in concert to push a fast-moving legislative agenda to unleash a frontal assault on American economic despair. Initial funds to sustain the nation’s COVID-19 recovery out of the blocks included stimulus payments, a federal boost to weekly jobless benefits and the child tax credit expansion. The President’s 2021 Build Back Better program targeted funds toward rebuilding America’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure, extending broadband to rural America, upgrading the electrical grid and improving water systems. The resulting good-paying jobs are part and parcel of rekindling the American economy based on good, middle-class employment.

Starting in 2022, the White House aimed at a new target: rekindling the US. manufacturing base by proposing significant investments in technology industries. The CHIPS Act aims to reduce America’s dependence on imported machinery and the need for electronic inputs for sectors, including energy efficiency technologies for buildings, cars and manufacturing in the future.

The Biden program aims to reinvent the nation’s industrial base more geographically targeted and equitably. The plan will level the playing field by selecting new locations to fertilise the growth of agglomerative forces. Traditionally, investment in new jobs has been directed toward existing agglomerations. Such decisions ignore ancillary productivity benefits from emergent spill overs and multiplier possibilities found in places of positive agglomerative potential. Biden’s equity plan is to utilise a place-based industrial investment program. This effort fills supply gaps in American automobile, electronic and instrument industries (Sperling, 2022). Near-turn worldwide investments in new chip capacity have the U.S. the recipient of 21 out of 48 identified investments.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently launched two place-based investment programs from the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). NSF’s Engines programme ‘aims to expand the frontiers of technology and innovation and spur economic growth nationwide through unprecedented investments in people and partnerships. NSF Engines holds significant promise to elevate and transform entire geographic regions into world-leading innovation hubs’.² The program intends to strengthen the capability of locations with innovative and industrial capacity but demonstrate the need for additional resources and technical support to reach a new level of technological innovation.

The Economic Development Administration’s Regional Technology and Innovation Tech Hubs Program ‘is an economic development initiative that leverages existing R&D strengths and technology demonstration and deployment capacities (public and private) within a region to drive technology- and innovation-centric growth and to catalyse the creation of good jobs for American workers at all skill levels, both equitably and inclusively (Muro, Parrilla and Ioffreda, 2023). The program is designed to strengthen US economic and national security with investments in regions across the country with assets and resources and with the potential to become globally competitive in the technologies and industries of the future—and for those industries, companies and the good jobs they create, to start, grow and remain in the USA. The Tech Hubs Program was also funded as part of the CHIPS and Science Act 2022.³

Both place-based programs face challenges. A recent article in the New York Times, ‘Plans for U.S. Chip Manufacturing Hit Obstacles’ (23 February 2024), highlights a variety of challenges, including a shortage of workers, the lack of ready skill training, excessive time lags between program announcements and funds dispersal, shortages of sophisticated equipment and the variability in global technology markets, to name a few. The turnaround from chip shortages to near-term market saturation is of particular concern for semiconductor consumers. Previous final product demand shortages are now verging on excess. Uncertainties around delivery dates for critical machinery combined with new vintages of technology highlight the complexity of the timing of factory expansions.

In an abrupt departure from federal government locational investment neutrality, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Lael Brainard, an advocate of giving place-based development funding a chance, is so far silent on the risks inherent in an investment theory. She is on stable footing when she remarks that: “Place-neutral in theory, trickle-down policies generated wealth and opportunity for some, but it was often ‘at the expense of widening inequality, deteriorating infrastructure, and fragile supply chains’ (Brainard, 2024). Less assurance is evident when place-based policies face supply constraints. With too much fuel needed all at once, input costs can grow out of control and lead to long waits for critical components. As Brainard counters, ‘the glaring failures of past place-neutral doctrines—local deindustrialisation, disinvestment, infrastructure deterioration, community distress—turn out to be exactly the kind of problems that place-based policies may be well suited to make progress on’. The right recipe for modest and sustainable growth is the absence of assessment of supply availability, which is a widespread problem given the weakness in our knowledge of supply and demand and dependence on inter-industry linkages.

Biden’s foray into revitalising local economies was initially hampered by Congressional infighting. Biden’s experience and a clever executive staff retargeted the original Build Back Better Bill. They finally funded the American Rescue Plan Act to resource the Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC)—a grant administered by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) of the US Department of Commerce. The Brookings Institution’s Metro Program and the EDA jointly sponsor the demonstration program. The BBBRC program provides five-year grants ranging from $25 million to $65 million across 21 regions competitively selected from a pool of 60 finalists.

The BBBRC aims to revitalise area economies stalled by the effects of COVID-19 and, in many cases, plagued by long-standing economic decline. The central premise is to support pre-existing local economies by injecting requisite resources aimed to (i) enable risk-taking given the underlying capabilities of the existing economic base; (ii) build interactions among members and functions within an existing cluster to foster greater integration and engagement among people and existing resources and (iii) invest anew in pre-existing but currently challenged industrial activities to achieve renewal based on injecting ideas, skills and capabilities. The program design included three stages. Initially, sites were given $500,000 in seed funds to jump-start their projects. As reported in a recent Brookings report:

Given the program’s focus on cluster-based economic development, the EDA asked applicants to explain their chosen cluster’s opportunities, its constraints, and its potential impact. Understanding “cluster maturity”—where a region’s cluster resides in the maturity lifecycle—was foundational to framing the cluster’s opportunities and constraints (Parilla et al., 2022, p.4).

Emphasis included identifying each location’s governance structure. Places with well-established resources adopted a model to accelerate low-maturity clusters (often in the energy space) into established clusters. These projects’ governance model primarily relied on connections with nearby universities. A second group focussed their current competitive advantages toward existing firms, and by extending ‘the reach of the cluster’s assets that enhance competitiveness and benefit more people and businesses within the region’ (Parilla et al., 2022: 4). The third cluster, comprised of mature industries, will use federal resources to jump-start foundation firms to achieve new levels of competitiveness in their existing industry niches.

All of the projects are targeting human capital additions to existing workforces, encouraging economic growth including employment, and developing intra-cluster engagement and strengthened governance practices. Less commonly, coalitions include production and business capacity metrics (82%), financing and investment metrics (67%), and innovation and commercialisation metrics (53%). Achieving measured additions to equity proved difficult; all projects attempted to embed equity in strategies, governance and metrics.

These programs are in the initial start-up phase; most are waiting for financial resources to build intra-organisational infrastructure. The measured efficacy of both the model of development (place-based) and the projects’ organisational design is important in identifying change over time between initial conditions and the effort to move the needle more. A willingness exists to provide resources to support guided experiments. The objective is to learn whether development can be initiated and consummated.

Federal funds will flow to test the feasibility of industrial competitiveness policies linked to place-based development schemes. Financial investments are being made in local industrial coalitions including universities and venture capitalists. Numerous community programs by states, local governments, private investors and philanthropy are applying a hand-up strategy to unleash local creativity to grow existing resources to rebuild community economies (Marshall, 2020). Jointly sponsored programs like the initiative linking Pittsburgh community groups with longstanding local non-governmental organisations and the University of Pittsburgh business school are stepping into the gap by offering business strategy, financing and job training services to local businesses to revitalise aspects of the metals industry and other ancillary partner employers. The number of local experiments is too numerous to recount (Croft, 2024).

The European Union Cohesion Policy: a longstanding policy to tackle less-developed regions

The European Union has a long tradition of place-based policy designed to support lagging regions across the broader European territory and beyond the borders of a single nation. The EU Cohesion Policy (CP)—the longstanding investment policy in Europe—was launched in 1989 and specifically designed for the integration of new member states. The policy is explicitly aimed at reducing disparities between regions and supporting the less developed regions (currently defined as regions having GDP per capita lower than 75% of the EU-27 average). Given the contemporary challenges and the continuous revisions of the policy, the CP has, in the last decade, gradually transitioned toward the broader aim of supporting a socio-economically just climate transition:

The European Union’s Cohesion Policy helps to ensure there are no gaps between countries and between different areas and regions in the same country. It supports key EU goals, such as the green and digital transition (European Investment Bank, 2024).

Since the 2014–2020 financial budgeting, the CP equates to one-third of the total EU budget, being the main investment instrument of the EU, with the current allotment having a 2021–2027 horizon. The CP funds include a variety of programs and projects for investments in a variety of thematic domains like infrastructure, research and innovation, education, training and support for small and medium-sized enterprises.

In particular, the Cohesion Fund, created in 1989 after the reform of structural funds, specifically tackles the less developed regions across the EU member states. The current round (2021–2027) targets specifically Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, with 37% of the total fund needing to be dedicated to climate objectives (European Union, 2024).⁴ There is extensive literature assessing the benefits and impacts of the CP on Central and Eastern European countries and new member states undergoing a process of Europeanization (for example, Bachtler et al., 2016a; Cotella and Dąbrowski, 2021; Heidenreich, 2003).

Certainly, the presence of a supra-national policy for a balanced regional development is of some value. Yet significant regional inequalities still exist within many member states of the EU, making the so-called geography of political discontent a flourishing body of research. Why is that the case? To fully answer the question, we must look at the national, regional and local levels of each member state. Here a series of other factors like cultural and social norms, governance structure, and historical path dependencies have to be considered. As seen in Fiorentino et al. (2024), the EU case confirms the predicament that left-behind places come in a variety of forms and as such they need a multi-scalar policy approach with a wide differentiation on measures at the very local scale, due to a variety of different contextual factors coming at play.

In the next section, we delve deeper into the lessons learnt drawn from the European context because of its long-standing track record on directly aiming to reduce regional inequality (as opposed to the USA). This context offers lessons learned and an array of scholarly studies to build upon. We conclude our overview, with a closer look to the case of the UK and the history of the German unification. We believe they represent two valuable examples for further reflections on the role of contextual variables in shaping very different outcomes in terms of regional divergences, even when convergence forces might be operating at the supra-national level (this was the case also for the UK, until Brexit).

Delivering successful policy outcomes: learning from the experience of the UK, German unification and the European Union

Lessons from the EU Cohesion Policy

The EU CP is the most longstanding and fitting example of a place-based policy, consistently drafted to support less developed regions over a long period. Several studies have highlighted the way this approach has enhanced regional development, economic growth and employment creation across Europe (Beugelsdijk and Eijffinger, 2005; Polverari and Bachtler, 2014). We could identify the CP’s key strength as its longevity and the thematic nature of the funding with a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Finally, the EU also paid considerable attention and efforts to monitoring the impacts of CP and forecasting future needs, nurturing a continuous intellectual debate on the topic.

In light of the multitude of studies undertaken within the above-mentioned intellectual realm: ‘one of the curious features of the policy is that there is surprisingly little consensus on how well it works, how effective it has been in reducing regional disparities and improving the performance of supported regional economies, and how useful it has been in fulfilling the goals set for it’. (Bachtler et al., 2016a: 2). Since 2014, the EU has adopted ‘theory-based impact evaluations’ to reflect on the efficacy of the various measures and adopted approaches within the CP. In terms of thematic areas, the CP has registered a major success in creating new employment opportunities, especially in specific sectors like innovation (business parks and entrepreneurship) and transport infrastructure (Bachtler et al., 2016b; Crescenzi and Rodríguez-Pose, 2012; Ferrara et al., 2017). However, several scholarly studies have established that the EU CP works better towards levelling up inequalities across member states of the EU at the macro-level, rather than effectively addressing regional inequalities within countries at the meso- or micro-level.

Crescenzi and Giua (2020) highlighted the unequal distribution of gains across member states, with some countries benefitting more than others, for example, Germany in terms of economic growth and the UK for employment creation. Different experiences have been registered by Spain and Italy, where only some short-term positive effects were registered post-2010 economic recession with fewer long-term positive effects. The causes of this different experience are structurally entrenched, unaddressed inequalities affecting Italy, and an excessive focus on hard infrastructure adopted by Spain (Crescenzi and Giua, 2020). Di Cataldo (2017) highlighted the success story of the UK, which attracted significant EU funding, raising the per-capita GDP, but whose effects were maximised and catalysed in specific areas that were already experiencing growth. In the case of the UK, a key factor in the regional divergence pattern—that also contributed to the Brexit vote—has been the structural asymmetries found in governance and the direction undertaken by institutions and political agencies at the national scale.

Several difficulties have also emerged in assessing the country-specific impacts of the policy, which have a very contextual nature (Jovancevic et al., 2015). State capacity, the quality of governments, corruption and legal traditions affect the national and local results of the CP (Charron, 2016; Rodríguez-Pose and Di Cataldo, 2015). No matter the country’s GDP, lower regional disparities have been found across EU member states with greater government effectiveness, stronger rule of law and lower corruption levels (e.g., Finland, Denmark and Sweden) as opposed to countries that have a history of higher corruption and weaker governments (e.g., Bulgaria, Romania and Italy) (Charron, 2016). These are all factors that are more difficult to manage within the framework of a Europe-wide CP for regional inequalities. Corruption and an asymmetrical institutional capacity within regions of the same country are also at the heart of the debate on further devolution of power to regions in Italy and the so-called reform to deliver ‘autonomia differenziata’ (or differentiated autonomy) to address regional inequalities with a more localised approach in Italy. Finally, technological innovation and the concentration of skilled workers influence the different regional outcomes of CP-funded projects.

In the CP discourse and the related body of literature, the assessment of convergence forces, equity and efficiency is a recurrent narrative (Farole et al., 2011). However, many scholars also suggest that the CP effectively creates additional competition among regions, even within the same country (Mancha-Navarro and Garrido Yserte, 2008). In other words, disadvantaged or ‘left behind’ regions continue being left behind even within the CP.

The current round of CP funds (2021–2027) has attempted to bring back the discussion on localised factors for inequalities as opposed to Europe-wide measures. The 2021–2027 budget was designed to lead the green and digital transition, tackling the different aspects of regional inequalities in a ‘more tailored’ manner; it is still largely based on GDP per capita but adds additional measures of inequality. However, early studies already show that this round of policy also has low chances of mitigating intra-country inequalities no matter the size of funds dedicated to less developed regions because greater efficiency and growth are still registered in more affluent regions (Mogila et al., 2022).

A new more integrated policy approach and tool is needed. Iammarino et al. (2019) called for a change of approach to support less-developed regions, where place-based policy like the EU CP ‘should be replaced by “place-sensitive” frameworks based on integrated micro (individual)–meso (territorial) logics of tackling diverse development trajectories’. (p.274). A very recent study on the future of the CP led by a task force of experts and scholars emphasised even further the required integration of different scales of interventions. The report suggests that the place-based and people-based approaches should be coupled and explored even further in future versions of the CP; its territorial dimension should be complemented by an additional performance-based approach to monitor results, limiting instead the focus on ‘integrating’ and supporting new member states (European Commission, 2024). Other studies also suggested that the CP has not responded well to major external economic shocks like the global financial crisis of 2008–2010 or the COVID-19 pandemic (Crescenzi and Giua, 2020; Sanchez and Jimenez-Fernandez, 2023). Scholars call for a future more evidence-based and results-oriented CP that mixes different approaches and methodologies to achieve economic and social cohesion at different levels (Berkowitz et al., 2020). A ‘new’ Cohesion Policy should support more specifically the well-being of Europeans and allow for a more specific and locally tailored approach.

Despite being a successful and useful strategy for integrating new member states and supporting economic cohesion at the macro-scale, the CP alone is not enough to address left behind places in Europe. To do so, it needs to be complemented by efficient national regional and local development policies. This also means that—outside the EU—countries like England, where the regional tier of governance is missing are naturally disadvantaged in dealing with the problem of regional inequalities and left behind places.

Lessons from the UK

Section 2 of this Editorial highlighted the renewed interest by HM Government in addressing spatial inequality in the UK as reflected in the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper in 2022. The White Paper has emerged at a time when spatial disparities in the UK remain very significant and, rather alarmingly, have been widening for many years (Martin et al., 2021). As many commentators have remarked, there has been no shortage of policy initiatives deployed by the British Government to address this problem. As section 2 of this Editorial commented, the first documented policy was in the 1920s in response to the impact of global recession on the traditional heavy engineering and extraction industries that were extensively located in Northern regions (McCallum, 1979). Over the last 90 years, the shape and form of policy in the United Kingdom has varied considerably. There is much evidence of success. Thus, from 1960 to 1981, British regional policy focussed extensively on attracting manufacturing investment to lagging regions. Research showed that it created some 750,000 more jobs in these regions than would otherwise have been there (Moore et al., 1986). Further, regeneration policies like Urban Development Corporations could bring back into use large tracts of derelict land in cities. However, despite these achievements, it has remained the case that the underlying imbalances characterising the British regional problem have worsened. As an article published by The Economist (2020) commented, other countries have poor bits, Britain has a poor half! This has led many to argue that policy intervention has failed to make a lasting, long term and sustainable impact on the basic problem. A recent example is the findings from the UK 2070 Commission chaired by the late Lord Kerslake (UK2070, 2019). The UK 2070 Commission undertook an extensive review of the factors that appeared to constrain progress in overcoming the UK’s spatial divide. Lord Kerslake wrote:

Much of what has been done to date to tackle the inequalities across the UK has been in the form of underpowered ‘pea shooter’ and ‘sticking plaster’ policies – too little and too short-lived. If we are really to shift the dial on spatial inequalities, what we require for the future will need to be structural, generational, interlocking and at scale (Lord Kerslake, Chair of the 2070 Commission).

The Levelling-Up White Paper made a similar observation:

There has been no shortage of attempts to tackle geographical disparities in the UK over the past century. These have been insufficient to close the widening gaps. That is because these efforts have tended to be short term, lacked scale and coordination, and were hamstrung by lack of data and effective oversight. Local leaders have also lacked the powers and accountabilities to design and deliver effective policies for tackling local problems and supporting local people (LUWP, 2022, Executive Summary, p. 16).

In their extensive review of the nature of the problem of left behind places in the UK, and the spatial intervention policies implemented over the last century to revive such places, Martin et al. (2021) sought quantify the level of resources that had been committed relative to the scale of the problem being addressed and to consider progress over the whole period. Their findings identified a number of systemic failings in the delivery of policy that had impeded progress. Many of which had been identified in the Kerslake 2070 Commission and, indeed, the more recent analysis contained in the Levelling-Up White Paper.

The failings took a number of forms. The first has been a continued inability to recognise the scale of the problem and the resources required to tackle it. Thus, although it is difficult to be precise, urban and regional policy expenditure was approximately £174.5bn (2020 prices) over 1961–2020, equivalent to £3.5bn per annum (or around 0.15% GNI). EU funds added another £1.4bn p.a, or 0.12% GNI, such that since the mid-1970s around £4.9bn per annum (0.27% GNI) had been committed. This compared to £14.5bn (0.70% GNI) in international aid in 2019. There has been a lack of a strategic vision for a spatially balanced economy and a failure on the part of successive governments to adopt a holistic view of local economic development. Crucially, there have been inadequate attempts to integrate regional policy with mainstream policy meaning that, overall, much of what government spent on its delivery of mainstream services tended to benefit the better off areas relatively to those left behind.

An overcentralised (‘top-down’) approach to policy formulation and implementation had led to an over-emphasis on ‘one size fits all’ policy measures that gave insufficient attention to the needs of local places and failed to engage with the relevant stakeholders sufficiently to ensure robust local place-based economic development. A disruptive churn of policies and policy institutions has characterised delivery and has impeded the development of long term, sustainable interventions that are essential to bring about long-term improvements in the relevant key outcomes. The dominance of central government in the development of policies, and the virtual total dependence of local government for resources from the centre to engage in local economic development have constrained the development of local policy making capacity and capabilities (Martin et al., 2021).

Lessons from German East-West integration

The experience of British regional policy can be contrasted with the experience of the German Aufbau Ost (‘building up’ East Germany) programme adopted following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. Clearly, there are substantial differences between the United Kingdom and Germany, with Germany having a federated system of governance. However, a recent assessment by Enenkel and Rosel (2022) provides much useful insight. In 1991/2, the GDP per worker in East Germany was 57% of the West German average. By 2019, it was 85%. By way of comparison, GDP per worker in the rest of the UK relative to the Greater SE was 75% in 2019.

German regional unification has certainly committed resources that recognised the scale of the problem. Since 1990, Germany has expended around €2trillion on this programme. This does include the payment of social welfare, around 45% of the total, and if this is excluded, investment in infrastructure, support for business and financial equalisation under the programme have been equivalent to around €1.1trillion, that is around £30bn per annum. This still several times regional policy aid in the UK.

The direct fiscal transfers to the East have enabled modernisation of infrastructure such that, in some places, the quality of the offer exceeds that available in the West. Resources have been delivered over a relatively long timeframe (30 years) with continuity guaranteed and ‘all’ political party buy-in throughout the period. Enenkel and Rosel comment ‘far ranging, permanent and based on all-party “whatever it takes” consensus’ (2022). Much of the support to business has tended to manufacturing businesses in the East. In fact, so much so, that capital intensity in industry in East Germany is now greater than that in the West. The focus on industry and less on knowledge-based services has attracted criticism. Enenkel and Rosel (2022) remark ‘Reunification lacked a forward-looking strategy for growth and economic revival. As a consequence, there was little focus on higher value activities, knowledge-based sectors or the role of large cities, which has contributed to the stubborn productivity gap between East and West. Rather than energising cities and services with future growth potential, manufacturing employment and in less-urban places was heavily subsidised (Enenkel and Rosel (2022)). German unification has demonstrated that reducing spatial inequalities requires long-term commitment, substantial resources and an integrated approach across government, both local and national.

Concluding thoughts

If nations are to address the problems faced by their left behind places, it is clear that they will have to adopt policy interventions that are customised to meet their specific needs. As shown by various papers in this Special Issue, the causes and features of left behind places are different across the various member states of the EU, the USA and the UK, making a one-size-fits-all approach impossible to enact. A localised knowledge and evidence at both the regional and local scales, shedding light on the causes of socio-economic decline, is needed to address the problem of left behind places.

Tackling left behind places also means moving beyond the ‘economic growth’ argument and tackling the social and environmental aspects of regional decline. For example, delivering social infrastructure, creating a new sense of belonging in places and regaining institutional trust, which can only be done by working directly with local communities.

More work needs to be done to rebuild and refocus social and territorial identities. This work should start from the macro level—for example in the EU the original purpose of the Cohesion Policy was that of creating a shared European identity and developing new tools to re-focus and re-emphasise the concept (Capello, 2017)—alongside other tools addressing cultural and territorial identities at the micro-level, that include developing measures to regain ‘pride in places’ as debated in the UK (Sandbu, 2020), or the recognition of the profound diversity of needs and opportunities between urban and rural areas in the USA, often looking beyond ‘growth-only’ agendas (Fikri, 2024).

These new tools could be found translating into practice some of the emerging theories and conceptual frameworks like the Foundational Economy (The Foundational Economy Collective, 2022) or the Proximity Economy, that is currently under study for the new industrial policy of the European Union (European Commission, 2023). The direction of the new thinking supports a basic delivery of services, infrastructure, economic activities, and opportunities for all in all places. However, the delivery of these specific local strategies for left behind places requires a large variability of resources and delivery mechanisms as well as a great local capacity, with the synergic use of both people-based and place-based policy approaches.

References

Footnotes