A NEW PARADIGM FOR LED? Local Economic Development (LED) is a discipline still coming into its own, with competing strands of argumentation still generating conflict. At the root of the conflict is debate over whether traditional types of local strategies a) are working, and b) are generating ‘pro-poor’ economic development, or simply more ‘uneven development’. The latter term refers to a structured, systematic mode of capital accumulation at one pole, and the ‘development of underdevelopment’ at another. Although it was once associated with ‘dependency theory’, it is a far more subtle conceptual approach to understanding ingrained poverty and inequality (Bond, 1998, 1999, 2000a, 2000b). The past two decades have, after all, witnessed extraordinary pressure on local authorities, especially formal municipalities, to become more entrepreneurial. These pressures have accompanied the overall slow-down in growth in the international economy that began during the late 1970s, and reflect shifting power relations. In short, urban entrepreneurialism became a feature of virtually all LED strategies as competition for investment intensified. The term ‘smokestack chasing’ emerged to characterise the most ambitious attempts to ‘place-market’ a given municipality. The tide has probably turned on this epoch, which was called the period of the ‘Washington Consensus’ because it entailed rigid nation-state adherence to ‘neoliberal’ (free-market) dictates, often enforced by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the discipline of international financial markets. These included: government budget cuts, increases in user-fees for public services and privatisation of state enterprises; the lifting of price controls, subsidies and any other distortions of market forces; liberalisation of currency controls and currency devaluation; higher interest rates and deregulation of local finance; removal of import barriers (trade tariffs and quotas); and an emphasis on promotion of exports, above all other economic priorities.