Sustainable Human Development (SHD) at the Local Level

Abstract

In recent years, conceptualizations such as “local development systems”, “valorisation of endogenous potential”, “embedded local knowledge”, “local public goods” and “place-based policy approaches” have been renewed in the academic literature. This has largely been due to contributions in economic geography — for example, the evolutionary approach (Arthur, 1994; Boschma and Martin, 2007; Boschma and Frenken, 2011), the focus on the urban and regional economy (Amin and Thrift, 1992; Storper, 1997) and the relational perspective (Bathelt and Glückler, 2003) — as well as the literatures concerning industrial districts (Scott, 1988; Becattini et al., 1990), Innovative Milieux (Camagni, 1991) and Regional Innovation Systems (Cooke, 2001). These theoretical and empirical arguments attribute increasing importance to the meso-economic level, where close relationships between “economy-institutions-society” take place (Hirschman, 1958; Cappellin and Garofoli, 1988; Becattini, 1989; Amin, 1999), and the institutional, geographical, historical and cultural characteristics of a territory shape development processes.