Place-based Solutions Research Articles

Advancing collaborative social outcomes through place-based solutions—aligning policy and funding systems

Abstract More collaborative and human-centered approaches to tackle social problems of entrenched disadvantage have been introduced in many countries, including Australia, but with mixed results. Traditional programs that reinforce existing political and bureaucratic processes have been seen as blockers to collaborative modes of policymaking, governance, and delivery. Drawing on collaborative governance perspectives, this paper reports new research undertaken in conjunction with a not-for-profit organization (Collaboration for Impact) involved in supporting place-based collaborative community change efforts. Research findings, based on stakeholder perspectives, highlight not only the potential benefits of a more collaborative model (i.e., placed-based and community driven) but also the significant unresolved challenges for “backbone” coordination bodies, which have recently been established to achieve more “joined-up” policy, funding, and service delivery arrangements. The paper concludes by proposing a practice-driven focus on policy and funding systems, together with implications for policy learning and program design.

Nachhaltige Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft: Förderung von Biodiversität und Klimaneutralität

Abstract To promote biodiversity, a diverse landscape is necessary. Structural change in agriculture and increasing cost pressure have led to the trend of fewer farms and larger farming units with less diversity. Reversing this trend is a societal task that requires a willingness to make sacrifices. For agriculture, we suggest combining new technologies and artificial intelligence to foster “new” ways of thinking for place-based solutions. That is, land management oriented towards natural habitats and more diversity, which is equally economically viable. It is essential to visibly reward the ecological added value.

Supporting places left to the sea: A place-based research agenda for regional coastal transformations in the blue economy

The blue economy purportedly involves equitable and sustainable development across a range of ocean sectors spanning fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, shipping, seabed mining, oil and gas extraction, and renewable energy. Here, we argue that blue economy scholarship and policy gives insufficient attention to coastal regions – and the cities, towns, and villages within – that depend on these sectors. Rather than prioritising the profitability of corporations and expansion of industry, we advise actors to consider three transformative processes that are (re)shaping coastal regions. First, are techno-industrial processes for which we draw on the fourth industrial revolution literature, highlighting that coastal regions must adapt to rapidly changing technological innovations or risk facing decline. Second, are socio-cultural processes for which we draw on the left-behind places literature, which exemplifies spatial inequalities from declining and deindustrialised coastal regions. Third, are physical-environmental processes, highlighting geographically variable opportunities and challenges around natural resources, marine biodiversity, and climate change in coastal regions. We then promote place-based policymaking as a multi-level and participatory mode of managing these transformations. Finally, we present a blue economy research agenda to help navigate these transformative processes, and enable place-based solutions. The article intersects with broader literatures around ocean governance and sustainable transformations.

Public-led shared workspaces and the intangible factors of urban regeneration in UK coastal towns

ABSTRACT Recent studies suggest that policies designed to create new shared workspaces have the power to deliver skills, innovation and new employment opportunities to peripheral areas and lagging economies. We examine this idea using case studies from two British coastal locations and industrial ports of different sizes and governance structures: Portsmouth (Hampshire) and Newhaven (East Sussex). Our findings indicate the need for integrated place-based solutions that are targeted and anchored in the local needs and identities of the place. Governmental frameworks should not only address the physical aspects of regeneration but also the social and institutional ones. Positive externalities are registered when shared workspaces act as social infrastructure. For this to happen, regeneration policy needs to work on community building, regaining local trust and nurturing positive local identities and imaginaries. Finally, we note that fragmented institutional patterns hamper the scaling up of positive externalities at the wider regional scale.

Place-based solutions for global social-ecological dilemmas: An analysis of locally grounded, diversified, and cross-scalar initiatives in the Amazon

The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this gap, this paper proposes that local initiatives that pursue three particular pathways are more likely to generate improvements in social-ecological outcomes: (1) maintaining close connections with local grassroots, (2) pursuing diversity in productive activities performed and partnership choices, and (3) developing cross-scale collaborations. To test these ideas we collected and analyzed observations of 157 initiatives in Brazil and Peru, applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that initiatives maintaining groundedness in representing the interests and concerns of local actors while partnering with other organizations at multiple scales are more likely to develop joint solutions to social-ecological problems. Partnerships and support from external organizations may strengthen and enhance local capabilities, providing a platform for negotiating interests and finding common ground. Such diversified pathways demonstrate the power of local actors to transcend their own territories and have broader impacts in sustainability objectives. Our findings highlight the need to make governmental and non-governmental support (e.g., financial, technical, political) available according to local needs to enable local initiatives’ own ways of addressing global environmental change.

Transport Inequality in Today’s Cities at the Intersection of Mobility and Inequality

One aspect of social inequality in today’s cities concerns transport inequality. This simply refers to the transport advantages of the rich compared to the poor (Gebresselassie & Sanchez, 2019). The transport inequality intersects with other forms of marginalization as well, based on gender, age, disability, and ethnicity. Yet for the mobile or kinetic elite (Andreotti, Le Gallès, & Moreno-Fuentes, 2013), all places and transport means are readily available. Furthermore, transport-related mega-projects accentuate the existing social inequalities of the neoliberal city. However, urban policy makers have begun to realize the importance of transport inequality and develop inclusive policies, such as “accessibility planning” in the UK (Lucas, 2012). Urban citizens are also forming mobility justice movements to protest against the increasing transport costs, as in Latin America (Díaz Pabón & Palacio Ludeña, 2021) and France. The encompassing mobility research is largely connected to social and environmental sustainability ideals. Hence, this paper will study the relationship between mobility and inequality through a thematic analysis of approximately 100 publications that were selected with certain keywords from the results of Web of Science searches, a few books, institutional reports and other sources. This literature review shows that transport inequalities are a reflection of the capitalist system and one of the main sources of social conflict in contemporary societies. Against the solution suggestions that range from rehabilitating the system to revolution as a process in the related literature, formation of place-based solutions that take into consideration both universal and local conditions is suggested in this study.

Place-Based Solutions for Net Zero: Gender Considerations on ‘Green’ Skills

There is a global effort towards transitioning to a zero or low-carbon economy due to climate change and the current energy crises. This requires a shift in socio-technical systems and cross collaboration amidst sectors. The move to a clean energy-based economy also involves the creation of a broad range of skills, the upskilling and reskilling of the existing workforce, and providing opportunities for training. While many critical analyses of emerging decarbonisation or green skills, focus on issues of clean energy transition and the distribution of opportunities between fossil fuel-based and clean energy industries, there is limited critical analysis of justice and equality regarding the distribution of opportunities for developing key green skills for place-based decarbonisation.
 There is evidence of asymmetric power relations and gender inequalities regarding the acquisition of skills, employment opportunities, kinds of jobs and pay gap which disproportionately affect women. This paper presents compelling evidence of hegemonic masculinisation within the energy industry; this tendency is now mirrored in ecological industries and technologies, including within the renewable energy sector, leading to an ‘eco-masculinisation’ of the sector.
 Just transition principles promote a fair distribution of resources and the representation of vulnerable groups, including women and minorities. By relying on local assets and resources, including human resources, place-based approaches to green skills could address local communities’ needs while strengthening their resilience. These processes are pivotal to a fair and equitable transition. By explicitly articulating the context of place in understanding the gender(ed) dynamics of decarbonisation and skills, the authors identify and reflect on an innovative way of understanding the intersections between infrastructures, skills, and masculinisation in the transition to low zero carbon.

Enabling urban systems transformations: co-developing national and local strategies

Transformative urban development is urgent to achieve future sustainable development and wellbeing. Transformation can benefit from shared and cumulative learning on strategies to guide urban development across local to national scales, while also reflecting the complex emergent nature of urban systems, and the need for context-specific and place-based solutions. The article addresses this challenge, drawing on extensive transdisciplinary engagement and National Strategy co-development processes for Australia. This includes generation of two frameworks as boundary objects to assist such transdisciplinary strategy development. An ‘enabling urban systems transformation’ framework comprises four generic overarching transformation enablers and a set of necessary underpinning urban capacities. This also built cumulatively on other sustainability and urban transformation studies. A complementary ‘knowledge for urban systems transformation’ framework comprises key knowledge themes that can support an integrated systems approach to mission-focused urban transformations, such as decarbonising cities. The article provides insights on the transdisciplinary processes, urban systems frameworks, and scoping of key strategies that may help those developing transformation strategies from local to national scales.Science highlights• Transdisciplinary national urban strategy development is used to distil generic frameworks and strategy scopes with potential international application.• The frameworks also build on other published framings to support convergent, cumulative and transdisciplinary urban science.• The ‘enabling transformations’ and ‘urban knowledge’ frameworks include the perspective of those developing sustainable urban systems strategies.• The enabling framework also informs ‘National Urban Policy’ and ‘Knowledge and Innovation Hub’ strategies, and prevailing power imbalances.• The knowledge framework can help frame urban challenges, missions and knowledge programs.Policy and practice recommendations• An urban ‘transformation imperative’ and ‘strategic response’ can be co-developed from local to national scales.• Local initiative is crucial to drive urban strategies, but sustained national leadership with coherent policy across sectors and scales is also key.• Diversity in engagement participation and processes generates whole-of-urban-systems and local-to-national perspectives.• Urban solutions are context-specific but generic frameworks can help collaborative issue framing and responses.• Collaborative issue framing informed by generic frameworks can bring broader perspectives to context-specific and contested policy and practice issues.

Contested planning efforts for the revitalization of small town centres in Finland

Many Finnish small towns have developed revitalization plans for town centres to counter the problems of decline, rebrand the town, and compete for residents and businesses. Accompanied by municipal branding efforts, infrastructure projects provide small towns with an improved appearance. These projects are often designed by national planning firms and consultants and materialised by private investors, yet it remains unclear if the changes suit the needs and socio-spatial peculiarities of the places they are intended for. This article sheds light onto downtown revitalization efforts by case studies in six shrinking Finnish small towns which have moved beyond the draft planning phase in their downtown revitalisation projects. The research is based on a mixed-methods approach, and pairs assemblage conceptualization with the concepts of small town planning and place-making. The relational approach enables us to show the challenges for shrinking small towns to materialise well-intentioned revitalization plans and place-based solutions in a complex place assemblage with conflicting pressure from big commercial actors, consultants, reluctant investors, limited local economies and demographics in decline.

Constructing futures, enhancing solutions: Stakeholder-driven scenario development and system modeling for climate-change challenges

Finding effective and practical solutions to climate change challenges in food-energy-water systems requires the integration of experts in local/regional social and biophysical systems, and these are commonly local community members. In the Magic Valley, Idaho we investigated the tensions between water used for energy and to irrigate cropland for food production, as well as, strategies for protecting water quantity and quality. Incorporating stakeholders with long-standing expertise allows the development of solutions to these challenges that are locally and regionally practical and consistent with the values of the social system into which they are incorporated. We describe a stakeholder-driven process used in a case study in the Magic Valley that incorporated local experts to develop plausible future scenarios, identify drivers of change, vet impact and hydrological modeling and map areas of change. The process described allowed stakeholders to envision alternative futures in their region, leading to development of enhanced context and place-based solutions and an anticipated time line for adoption of those solutions. The solutions developed by the stakeholders have been applied across many geographic areas. The described process can also be applied across a broad range of geographic levels. Most importantly, stakeholders should be involved in anticipating solutions and solution timing to the differing challenges posed by each scenario.

Developing Companionship with the Left-Behinds

The subject of regional inequality has been garnering the attention of scholars over the past decade and has generated debates on territories forgotten by mainstream economic activities. Left-behind places are a global phenomenon yet with various situated conditions in different development contexts that required customized, place-based solutions. This paper discusses a possible approach to work with the left-behinds: using the university as an institutional resource to engage people and places in regional regeneration. Using the [anonymised] project as an example, we describe the learning journey of developing the ground solutions and companionship between a research university and left-behind communities in the rural badlands region. Adopting a hybrid of an asset-based approach to community development and collaborative planning for regional development, this case demonstrates a potential level-up strategy for sustainable development for the lagging region.

Action on Poverty and Hardship in the English Potteries

Reflecting on anti-poverty work within Stoke-on-Trent from a variety of academic perspectives, this special edition offers a place-based examination of action on poverty and hardship that seeks to link local, creative, place-based solutions to national and international anti-poverty agendas. Each article links to how the author(s) contribute to action on poverty and hardship in the potteries and reflects on national, place based anti-poverty perspectives. The special edition holds key themes around the need for place-based longitudinal investment, the imperative to work with communities, foregrounding the knowledge held by lived experience. In conclusion, Stoke-on-Trent is a community in which many of the authors live, all of whom work and one in which Gratton (2020) articulates that the University has made an institutional commitment to work in partnership with to address poverty. The articles also demonstrate that academics working in collaboration with the anti-poverty sector including people with lived and learned experience and alongside students can achieve positive change in a city, with recognition that more can be done locally to transform lives, neighbourhoods, transport routes and wider societal economic and well-being reform.

An imperative to focus the plastic pollution problem on place-based solutions

There is an increased focus on plastic pollution and the resultant harms in our oceans and on our shores at local, regional, and global scales. New technologies are being developed and trialed, multilateral agreements are coming into play, and the role of a circular economy is increasingly touted as the key to help solve the plastic pollution crisis. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the disruption of global supply chains from the COVID-19 pandemic, increased fuel prices and increased scope and scale of natural disasters. Individual countries are setting national targets and are developing national plans of action to combat plastic pollution. In this paper, we focus on Australia's National Plastics Plan as a case study of a national approach to addressing this transboundary issue. We discuss the Plan in relation to supply chains, the role of standards and best practices, and principles for a successful circular plastic economy. We explicitly consider the role of reverse logistics and regional approaches that could be developed and implemented within island nations. Overall, we argue for culturally appropriate, economically and environmentally place-based solutions as a necessary approach to help reduce plastic losses to the environment, acknowledging that plastics leakage to the environment is a social equity issue.

Is the Australian primary healthcare system ready for the Rheumatic Heart Disease Endgame strategy? Data synthesis and recommendations

Is the Australian primary healthcare system ready for the Rheumatic Heart Disease Endgame strategy? Data synthesis and recommendations

Measuring the gaps in drinking water quality and policy across regional and remote Australia

Drinking water quality remains a persistent challenge across regional and remote Australia. We reviewed public reporting by 177 utilities and conducted a national assessment of reported exceedances against the health-based and aesthetic guideline values of the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines (ADWG). Four definitions of a basic level of drinking water quality were tested to quantify service gaps across regional and remote areas of each subnational jurisdiction in 2018–2019. At least 25,245 people across 99 locations with populations <1000 reportedly accessed water services that did not comply with health-based guideline values. Including larger towns and water systems, the estimated service gap rises to at least 194,572 people across more than 115 locations. Considering health parameters and the ADWG definition of ‘good’ aesthetic characteristics, the reported service gap rises further to at least 627,736 people across 408 locations. Forty percent of all locations with recorded health exceedances were remote Indigenous communities. Monitoring and reporting gaps indicate that the actual incidence of non-compliance with the guideline values of the ADWG could be much higher than our estimates. Our results quantified the divergence in the assessment of water quality outcomes between Sustainable Development Goal Target 6.1 and the ADWG, demonstrated disparities between service levels in capital cities and the rest of Australia, and highlighted the need for place-based solutions. The methods and dataset provide a ‘proof-of-concept’ for an Australian national drinking water quality database to guide government investments in water services.

Placing a housing lens on neighbourhood disadvantage, socioeconomic position and mortality

Placing a housing lens on neighbourhood disadvantage, socioeconomic position and mortality

Rural service hubs and socially innovative rural-urban linkages: A conceptual framework for nexogenous development

Co-locating services has become a common solution to the many longstanding challenges of service access and provision in rural areas. Rural service hubs – which offer two or more services at the same outlet – take many forms, typically responding to triggers for social innovation. Despite their growing ubiquity, however, rural service hubs have been little studied in comparative perspective. This article shifts the lens on service hubs from place-based solutions towards a broader, multi-scalar and multi-level perspective on rural connectivity. We propose a five dimension conceptual framework in contribution to the emerging theorisation of nexogenous rural development a model for resourceful reconnection beyond place and across rural–urban space. Drawing on examples from Austria, Finland and Wales, we illustrate how diverse service hub models mobilise social innovation, networks, scale and proximity to support service access and provision.

Consumer Perceptions, Behaviors, and Knowledge of Food Waste in a Rural American State

Understanding consumer knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors towards food waste is critical for informing evidence-based programs to advance sustainable food systems. A lack of knowledge regarding consumer food waste at the local level limits the ability to inform place-based solutions that are locally relevant. We administered an online survey to examine consumer perceptions, behaviors, and knowledge of food waste at the household level in Montana, a rural state in the United States. The majority of surveyed participants (58%) reported that they waste 10% or less of procured food. Almost half the participants (48%) are willing to take additional action to reduce food waste. Social factors including guilt and setting a good example were found to be greater motivators for reducing food waste compared to economic and environmental factors. Most survey participants (80%) perceive it would not be difficult to notably reduce their household's food waste. Overall, participants' reporting of their household's food waste quantity is lower than national quantities while their willingness to reduce food waste was higher than findings from a national survey. This study highlights the need for place-based solutions that are locally relevant to reduce household food waste towards enhancing the sustainability of food systems for supporting planetary health.

Unincorporated Health: Understanding Residents’ Perspectives on Factors Impacting Their Health and Emergent Place-Based Solutions

ABSTRACT Increased mortality rates and decreased life expectancy in the United States are associated with rurality, even after adjusting for poverty. In unincorporated rural communities, high population density may compound the negative health impact of the upstream factors associated with rurality, yet little is known about how this context contributes to residents’ health. We conducted nine focus groups with youth and adults from March–July 2017 in two Texas unincorporated rural communities. Using ecosocial theory and applied thematic analysis for focus groups, we investigated social, political, and historical factors that affect health. We identified two primary themes: upstream barriers to community health and K-12 schools as facilitators of community health. K-12 schools, and full-service community schools, in particular, may have an important role in closing the rural-urban health gap, even in the context of structural constraints associated with unincorporated rural status.

Beyond place-based: the role of virtual communities via social media in young adult recovery

In post-disaster recovery, optimising psychosocial support is important for all groups of the population, yet young adults have tended to be overlooked as a demographic in their own right. Research was conducted to seek the perspectives of young adults through the narrative of their experiences in the years following the 2009 Gippsland bushfires. One emergent theme in the findings highlighted the importance of information and communication during and after events. Participants in this research sought information and support via social media and virtual communities. These sites traverse localised, place-based solutions, enabling young people to communicate over large geographical areas. The platforms aid dynamic and rapidly evolving support by sharing information, feelings and ideas. This research also highlighted the need to identify the gaps in information processes and support systems for young adults and to ensure youth-specific information is included in formal communications. Possible solutions are outlined taking into consideration the perspectives offered by the study participants.