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The chapter provides an overview of the legacy and emergence of Area-based Initiatives in England and Germany. In England a considerable history of area-targeted policy approaches to the concentration of economic deprivation in cities can be noted in concept Germany recently discovered the need for a national initiative for disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The chapter also reviews the evolution of urban policies during a time in both countries in which two Social Democratic Parties had taken over central government responsibilities and were actively transforming the conception of welfare delivery in both countries.

This chapter traces the evolution of policy responses to health inequalities research in Great Britain. It explores the government's response to the recommendations of the Acheson Report and analyses what might be referred to as mid-stream policies in the form of area-based initiatives (ABIs). It also highlights how commitments to evidence-based policy have shaped the policy response and particularly the relative emphasis placed on downstream interventions.

This chapter examines the history and contemporary experience of local action and community development in Great Britain and its role in reducing health inequalities. It describes broad alternative macro-level strategies for tackling health inequalities and suggests that insufficient attention has been given to the question of how they might intersect with micro-level interventions. It evaluates the origins of community development approaches to health and evaluates the New Labour's policy of ‘turning to the community’ in relation to possibilities and limitations of area-based initiatives (ABIs). It concludes that broader community development strategies have an integral part to play in developing a new synthesis between top-down structuralist approaches and bottom-up participative approaches to tackling health inequalities.

The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of geographically-targeted urban policy initiatives designed to address what the then Home Secretary James Callaghan described as the “deadly quagmire of need and apathy" in some inner-city communities. This chapter considers how these urban policies have evolved since the late 1960s, with a particular focus on the experimental character of these initiatives and their changing interpretation ‘community’. It focuses particularly on the (re)turn to community in urban policy from the early 1990s onwards, when community involvement, and ultimately community leadership, came to be seen as the solution to previous policy failure. The chapter argues that community-led urban policies repeated the mistakes of past initiatives by misrepresenting the causes of neighbourhood decline. It also suggests that the effective abandonment of urban policy experiments since 2010 is arguably be the biggest regeneration experiment to date.

This short chapter provides an introduction to the book. It highlights the emergence of New Localism(s) across Europe and the role of Area-based initiatives as national urban policies for regenerating deprived urban areas. It ends with a short summary of each book chapters.

The chapter provides the analytical framework for this cross-national comparison. Applying a neo-institutional lens, the Institutional Capacity Building Framework is presented to analyse and compare the transformation and institutionalisation of social, political and intellectual capital during the implementation of both Area-based Initiatives.

The chapter highlights the value of neo-institutional frameworks for studying institutional change, its insight for the future refinement of state theories, the implications for comparative evaluation research as well as the prospects of Area-based Initiatives (ABIs) across Europe

This chapter implies that by 2005, there were significant changes to the original concept of Sure Start, so the question of whether it had worked or not was confounded by the question of what it now was. From an area-based initiative of 250 local programmes, they were now tasked with delivering the commitments in Choice for Parents, the Best Start for Children: a Ten Year Strategy for Childcare. No longer an area-based policy for poor children, there would now be a Sure Start Children's Centre in every community, 3,500 in all. While the funding was to be more flexible, the service model requirements were significantly tightened up. Many of the changes to the service model were a response to the evaluation results produced by the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) team. Ministers took some disappointing results very seriously and used them to reshape the programme.

This chapter evaluates the outward-looking, multilevel neighbourhood-regeneration approach in Great Britain. It describes the Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) in England and the Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) in Scotland, and proposes a hypothesis as to why the area-based initiatives (ABI) model has been unable to fundamentally challenge neighbourhood trajectories. The chapter explains that while the multilevel approach seems to signal a shift away from a simple focus on the internal problems of deprived neighbourhoods, it remains surprisingly disengaged from wider structural issues, such as the management of the regional economy.