Abstract
Place leadership is at a critical juncture. Since the 1990s, it has been taken for granted that for places to prosper, effective partnerships combining the interests of multiple stakeholders are essential. The leadership of place-based partnerships is crucial to their success and has accordingly received increased attention in academic and policy circles, but the notion of place leadership remains an ideological phenomenon founded on numerous case studies with few conclusions that can be generalised across wider spatial scales or beyond advanced economies. This article examines place leadership through examining England’s local enterprise partnerships, in particular looking at the role of the private sector vis-a-vis the public sector. The complexity of these partnerships is explored, and the article argues for the role of collaborative leadership to address that complexity. It contributes a set of guiding principles to guide new ways for place-based working that can better embrace the private sector and engender a more collaborative leadership practice.
Highlights
Place leadership is at a critical juncture
In England, economic development policy was decentralised by the Labour government in 1997 to regional development agencies (RDAs) who were tasked with the development and implementation of policy across nine regions
The context leaders are involved in the connections between leaders and material place (Ropo et al, 2013), and the power relations enmeshed into the politics of places (Hartley, 2005) have all been shown to generate a challenging environmental complexity
Summary
Place leadership is at a critical juncture. Since the 1990s, it has been taken for granted that for places to prosper, effective partnerships combining the interests of multiple stakeholders are essential. In recognising the embeddedness of local economic influences, the creation of LEPs placed greater value on local networks and institutional context in shaping micro-economic behaviour These multi-organisational collaborations between the public, private and third sector were created to increase the influence and engagement of the private sector over place leadership towards a more shared, collaborative form of leadership that could achieve synergistic benefits beyond their own reach and capability (Hemphill et al, 2006; Huxham, 2003). Variation in their structure was deliberately built into the development of the LEPs from the outset whereby the white paper enabled local areas to define their own partnership arrangements with some parameters stipulated by the government including private sector leadership. The LEPs are funded via a competitive bidding and negotiation process whereby the LEPs develop multi-year economic plans for central government to secure growth funding and in some cases, non-financial levers
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