Back at base, reflecting
Neil McInroy- LGC, 29th October 2008
He is visiting Poland; Portland, USA; Culiacan, Mexico; Coimbatore, India; Haiphong; Vietnam and Yokkaichi, Japan. This blog is written on a brief return to the UK.
A lot of recent talk about how we deal with the global economic crisis, is focussed on spending our way out of a recession. This approach, however, appears to miss a trick, as it fails to take into account the role of Local Government, specific local economies of our places, new forms of social equity and working within environmental limits.
The thing about real local resilience, is that it is not just about a national or global quest for illusive and probably short- term economic growth, but is also about ensuring that a local economy, in the long term, can work within environmental limits and create higher levels of social fairness than has hitherto been the case.
Local resilience as we are discovering in our work, is certainly about a strong local economy which can repel or bounce back quickly from external economic shocks, however, it is also about dealing with the internal local spatial and social problems of inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor - problems which trickle down economics have failed to deliver on in the 20 years of ‘boom times’.
Thus, these economic new times require new ideas. Ok, we can borrow from the past and the use of public spend as a ballast within the economy is correct, but the rush to embrace Keynesian policy as a panacea for getting us out of a recession, whilst good for unemployment and keeping us ticking over is, in the long term, only part of the solution.
It is early days in this Keynesian debate, but collapsing confidence in capitalism, banking and the markets, coupled to ongoing environmental concerns, means that in terms of forging real local economic resilience for our times, we must be a lot smarter and far sighted at both the national and in particular the local level.
We cannot just adopt an old orthodoxy, but we must now start thinking about the future and ensure that we are at the beginning of creating, at the local level, a set of local economic ideas which are more environmentally and socially just, which do not just slavishly follow crude market, growth or spending policies of the past.
In this local authorities are uniquely placed. It is at the Local authority level where their ‘place shielding’ role enables them to gaze across the social, environmental, cultural and economic dimensions of place and start to begin to forge new ideas and thoughts about how these things connect up to create a resilient place.
It is Local Authorities who should be able to see how we can put in place long term strategies which ensure local economic resilience in the future, and that we work within environmental limits. It is Local authorities who can think about a local economy which is a whole lot more than crude economic growth, GVA and inward investment pounds.
As Keynes himself stated in 1933, we must work toward local policies which reverse an economic system which is ‘capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend’.
Available on the LGC website- click here.
