The annual conference of the Regional Studies Association (RSA) Irish Branch, recently held in the National University of Ireland Maynooth, highlighted the need for greater joined up thinking on local and regional development in Ireland. Contributors from the OECD identified the importance of regional and local areas to aggregate national levels of economic growth.
Of particular importance in the Irish context, the OECD contributors highlighted the importance of medium sized cities and regions in addressing their own economic progress.
The speakers acknowledged that there is no magical ‘one size fits all’ solution. Good infrastructure, investment in human capital and promoting innovation are all key elements but having well developed institutional arrangements, which link across levels of government, are as important. To achieve this, the Irish Government, they suggest, should ensure that it efficiently links all levels of Government, most notably local government, with the national policy framework for economic renewal and the SMART Economy. Of specific note was the fact that they highlighted, as best practice, what might be described as a variant of the Irish development board structure now in place in parts of Spain! This came as no surprise to some of the Irish contributors given that the development board structure and process has been replicated in several European countries. The key difference between the Irish boards and those in other countries being that the role of their counterparts in other countries is underpinned by strong linkage between the local and national/regional policy framework, something that has been highlighted in several evaluations of the development board process in Ireland as a key weakness.
According to the OECD speakers, in building a sound and sustainable regional economy, Ireland should design regional polices that combine bottom-up with top-down approaches designed to unlock the regional potential of all Irish regions. Past growth, their evidence suggests, has been rather unevenly distributed, a fact also alluded to by a number of the Irish contributors at the conference. This requires, in the view of the OECD, close collaboration among actors across all levels of government, as well as the private sector and civil society. The policy design should be in line with the new paradigm shift observed in many OECD countries from redistributive subsidies to investment in regional competitive advantages and from a narrowly sectoral approach to integrated cross-sectoral projects.
The papers, all of which make interesting and important reading, are now available through the following RSA Irish Branch web-site.
The conference itself was an important first step by the Irish branch of the Regional Studies Association to re-invigorate debate in Ireland in regard to the role local and regional government can make to national economic renewal.
