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Regional economic development is shaped by many policies, which are implemented by national governments, regional and state governments, and local governments. But local economic development policies in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area since 1970 had little to do with the economic divergence of these two regions. In reality, many so-called economic development policies have little to do with economic development as such, instead emphasizing land use changes and competition for sales tax revenue rather than industry and job development. Many of the problems with local planning and development policies in the United States in general are exemplified by the comparison of the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles.

High-wage specialization comes from a complex sequence involving entrepreneurship, encouragement by local robust actors or leaders, breakthrough innovations, new organizational practices, the emergence of supportive overall relational infrastructure and networks, the proliferation of new specialized brokers and dealmakers, the diffusion of conventions or rules of thumb for doing business in new ways, and ultimately the consolidation of major firms. What is common to all processes of successful respecialization of a region’s economy is the emergence of the right kinds of networks, organizational practices, worldviews, and beliefs for the region’s evolving economic specializations. It is crucial to align understandings and change expectations so as to change policy agendas and to open up new forms of private action. When regional conversations are outdated, the process of organizational adjustment is stymied, as it has been in Los Angeles for 40 years. Old conversations must not crowd out new ones.

This chapter concludes that the chambers have shown remarkable durability by being adaptable to new needs, and diversifying their service bundle over time. However, the 1980s seem to have become something of a ‘clean break’ with the past. The causes for this are sought in product life cycles, shifts to a small firms economy, expansion of chamber territories to cover larger areas more thinly, but most important has been contracting and partnering with government. This has introduced far more instability than that in the economy, with changes arsing from changes in the party in power, administrative confusion, and ministerial caprice. For the future it is suggested that chambers need to re-emphasize their USP and develop stronger independent missions that maintain government links more on their own terms.

It is not just market forces and imperative coordination that fail; civil society as a mode of governance at the intersection of networks and solidarity is also prone to failure. This claim is illustrated from four case studies. First, recent work on global social policy; second, a critique of the literature on the neoliberal project of ‘good governance’ to solve the problems of local economic development; third, a study of the difficulties of economic governance in Dartford (regarding the London Science Park) and Greater Manchester (its Olympic Bid); and, fourth, a periodization of corporatism and social economy models. In each case, the focus is on the discourses and multi-spatial character of the social problem and the dynamics of policy failure.

This chapter sets Connected Communities in the context of current thinking on local economic development in the 'post-regeneration' era. I briefly survey post-1997 state-led regeneration in the UK, tracing the shift in England from holistic neighbourhood-level social inclusion initiatives to economically-focused local growth programmes. Next, I highlight the various 'shocks' that have hit these regeneration models since 2007, and discuss where this leaves neighbourhood-level activity in particular. The theories of change invoked for such programmes suggest that their economic impacts will be small, but that interventions also have an important non-economic rationale. Getting a sense of ‘what works’ in urban regeneration is challenging, however, given the multifaceted nature of the programmes and underlying system complexity. The UK’s emerging experimentalist paradigm could generate a more convincing evidence base for neighbourhood-level urban regeneration, but there are real constraints to what localism and the 'what works' agenda can do, particularly under austerity.

Chapter 6 examines how politics as values plays out at the local scale. Drawing upon a case study of how public support for local food markets is affecting farming near Bordeaux, the chapter first shows that although the values of Security and Tradition have been mobilized to shift the distribution of foods to favour local suppliers, thus far proponents of this displacement have failed to significantly challenge the value primacy of Freedom and Equality as equal access which dominates the food industry as a whole. Meanwhile, although actions in favour of local economic development aim to give more importance to Tradition and Security, a study of practices in the Charente shows that Freedom continues to be the principle that dominates how company managers frame economic growth and how they think public actors should be helping them achieve this goal.