How to Deliver the Economic Ambition of Devolution
Every place has potential. Not every place knows how to unlock it. Devolution is the biggest opportunity local and regional economic development in Britain has had in a generation. It is also on a clock. This book is about what the people doing the work can get right - and how to build the capability, culture and leadership that deliver.
Power, money and responsibility are moving to mayors, combined authorities and councils - the opportunity places have been asking for. The places that thrive will be the ones that build the capability to use it well: sound evidence, strong relationships, well-designed programmes, disciplined delivery and continuous learning. All of it is buildable, and this book shows how.
This book is not a strategy document and it is not a toolkit. There are no holy grails of local and regional economic development: no formula, no transplantable model, no single lever that works everywhere. What there is, instead, is a set of disciplines and capabilities that make institutions great at delivery. Prosperity in Every Postcode is an operating philosophy for the people responsible for the results.
Ambition itself is not the problem. Ambition is the point.From Chapter 6: Ambition With Realism
Fourteen chapters, an introduction and a conclusion - plus thirteen one-page flash guides to functional best practice and professional skills.
The lessons of forty years of policy, honestly told - so the next decade can be different.
Understand how your economy actually got here and what is really causing its condition. Everything downstream of a wrong diagnosis is waste.
The part most books in this field do not have: generating solutions with ideas and foresight, backing the right businesses, and fusing ambition with credibility.
Delivery: building the impactful and stopping the rest, asking why when delivery stalls, and the learning organisation that can prove its case to government.
Partnership that matches the complexity of the economy, the organisation and people that decide whether any of it takes, leadership that takes everyone with you - and the standard the whole endeavour is judged by.
Economic development practitioners, from officer to director. Combined authority and council leaders, mayors and their teams. Civil servants designing the settlements. Anyone whose work will help devolution deliver on its economic ambition.
It pairs with The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook: the Handbook is the reference for the whole field; this book is the judgement, disciplines and leadership that make the machinery work. Explore the Handbook here.
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