The chapter explores what professional engagement as a geography teacher looks like by identifying several geography-specific communities of practice and a range of resources suitable for teacher professional learning (TPL) in geography. Attention then focuses on the nature of professional engagement overall. Throughout the chapter, the reader is challenged to reflect on and consider how they can continue to maintain and build their capacity as a graduate and proficient early-career teacher of geography.

The chapter explores the nature of geography as a school subject. It reviews the five aims of the Australian Curriculum: Geography, as these are a guide for teachers in thinking about their objectives in teaching. It then discusses geography’s ways of thinking, which are based on a set of concepts that underpin the curriculum and make it distinctively geographical through the ways in which they view the world, the issues they identify as significant, and the questions, methods of analysis, explanations and criteria for evaluation they generate. These concepts are place, space, environment, interconnection, scale, change and sustainability, and they are unpacked and explained in this chapter.

This chapter discusses the commonalities and differences in L&RED across England, Northern Ireland, Australia and the US. It introduces the survey results with a broad-ranging overview, with more detailed analyses following in the individual national chapters. The focus of this chapter is on four themes: the institutional characteristics of the respondents; governance, partners and partnerships; the objectives, regional capacity building and business service activities of responding agencies; and the assessment of effectiveness. The emphasis here is on the aggregate data, with the national chapters providing more detailed breakdowns in order to analyse in greater depth some of the differences within each nation. In many instances in this chapter and subsequent chapters we separately discuss local government agencies and non-local government L&RED agencies. This distinction reflects the very substantial differences between the two in some nations.

Institutional architectures for local and regional economic development

The size of area served, the structure of the local or regional economy, organisation type, funding levels and staff resources can all in different ways influence how L&RED agencies set about developing their local economies and assessing their performance in this task. These institutional factors vary across nations according to historical and political circumstances, the structure of the economy and the system of government.

Some notable differences emerge when we examine the type of region served by respondents to the survey. This partly reflects the differing institutional approaches in each country and partly the differences in our sampling in each country. In Australia and Northern Ireland 40% of responding L&RED agencies were based in predominantly rural areas, compared to 23% in England and 36% in the US (Table 3.1). Australia's high rural response rate reflects the fact that regional development there has focused on non-metropolitan regions (see Chapter One), a political imperative reinforced by the traditional importance of primary production and also discourses of non-metropolitan disadvantage and accusations of bias against ‘country’ areas (NSW Country Mayors Association, 1993).

Local governments were the most common institutional type to respond in Australia and England, accounting for around 60% of the total, while regional or local development boards/committees were the largest group of respondents in the US and Northern Ireland.

Introduction

To get a sense of the scale and pace of the growth in L&RED activity, it has been estimated that worldwide the number of RDAs leapt from perhaps 400 in the mid-1980s to at least ten times that number by the late 1990s (Lovering, 1999). Lovering has almost certainly underestimated the number of L&RED agencies both in the 1980s and now, but his assessment does capture the rate and pace of growth in this field. At the local level, the change has been even more dramatic: in the late 1970s many places in the case study countries did not have a formal economic development agency, today most do. Moreover, in any area with more than 100,000 people there are likely to be several agencies engaged in complementary or competing activities. This in part reflects both specialisation among agencies and a broadening of L&RED policy (Haughton, 1999a).

This chapter sets out to examine four sets of interrelated issues. First, why has there been a growth in the number of economic development institutions? Second, why have we witnessed growth in the range and type of activities which constitute local economic development? Third, how and why do certain types of approach to local economic policy come to be dominant at particular points in time? Fourth, how can we best make sense of the similarities and differences across nations in the way local economic development is pursued?

Governance, institutions and the state

Most L&RED activity is sponsored by the state, which provides the legal framework, legitimacy and resources for most institutions, from direct funding and matched funding for government and various partnership bodies, to granting tax breaks and charitable status for independent private and community-based institutions. The state has long had an interest in supporting local development policies: what has changed over time are the rationales, expectations, magnitude and modus operandi of local development activity. This section examines how the state has operated strategically and selectively in the forms of approach that it has been willing to support, examining the rationales for these in the context of changing macro-level approaches to managing economic growth.

It is not our intention to provide a detailed history of local development, taking into account the many different national approaches. Rather, the more limited aim is to highlight how current approaches build from previous experience of local development.

Introducing local and regional economic development

Working to help create jobs and promote well-being at the local level – who could possibly object to that? Well many have, as critics from different perspectives have argued that the activities of local and regional economic development (L&RED) bodies are variously unnecessary, inadequate, ineffective, or even counterproductive. By contrast, there are others who argue that ‘communities carry their future in their own hands’, and that ‘self-help’ is the only assistance cities and regions can expect – and should wish for – within the global economy.

It is in this context that this book sets out to improve our understanding of how local economic development is currently practised in Australia, England, Northern Ireland and the US. The emphasis is on the institutional architecture of L&RED: which organisations do what, where, why, how, and in conjunction with which partners?

The main aims of the book are to:

• • map the institutional landscape of L&RED in each country, emphasising how responsibilities are shared across scales of activity, from local, regional and national to supranational;

• • examine the different governance structures for delivering L&RED in each country, and the partners with which institutions work;

• • outline the main funding systems for local development in each country;

• • examine the stated objectives of local and regional development institutions in each country, and the strategies and instruments used to achieve these objectives;

• • analyse some of the main differences within each country in how local development activities are conducted;

• • provide a critical analysis of the views of practitioners of the most and least effective approaches to economic development in each country; and

• • develop an appreciation of the factors which practitioners consider are impediments to greater effectiveness, and of their views on what would increase effectiveness.

In addressing these issues the book provides a unique set of insights into some of the similarities and differences in the way in which local economic development is conceived, perceived and conducted in the four countries. Having a comparative component to the work is important as it helps highlight major differences in approach, which in turn helps in developing a better appreciation of the distinctiveness of each nation's experience. The comparative dimension of the work is also important because it raises some intriguing questions, such as, why is it that a policy approach which is considered mainstream in one jurisdiction may be virtually untried in others?

The aim of this book was to map the similarities and differences in the practice of L&RED across England, Australia, the US and Northern Ireland. We found that while organisations from different nations often share objectives, strategies and types of partner, it is possible to identify distinctive institutional architectures in each. The emphasis given to the needs of businesses, partnership building, technology transfer and the relationship with governments, varies appreciably. One of the achievements of this book has been its capacity to quantify this difference through the use of measures of an organisation's behaviour, values and perceptions. We have been able to use a common set of indicators to assess what is important in each nation, why it is important and how L&RED organisations relate to other agencies.

Understanding differences in local and regional economic development

Through this book we have been able to show that there is considerable commonality across the four nations in the number of types of partners L&RED agencies work with, as well as convergence in the number of objectives, capacity building and business service activities undertaken by these bodies (Table 8.1). To a certain degree this convergence was anticipated: organisations were selected for inclusion in the survey because their engagement with their local economy was perceived to conform to current understandings of L&RED. However, our definition of an L&RED organisation is a little broader than those of other studies. Halkier and Danson (1998, p 27), for example, suggest that it is possible to identify three broad criteria that denote an RDA: organisationally it is in a semi-autonomous position with respect to its political sponsors; strategically it supports endogenous growth through ‘soft’ policy instruments; and these agencies implement L&RED through the integrated application of a range of policy instruments. Many of our respondent organisations conform to these criteria, but the US respondents were perhaps more concerned with industrial recruitment and infrastructure provision, and less focused on endogenous development, than Halkier and Danson (1998) would allow. The main difference between our organisations and those in some other studies, however, is the inclusion of the economic development activities of local government in all four countries, as well as the inclusion of a number of organisations that are structurally independent of all three levels of government.