Actors and institutions in localities and regions across the world are seeking prosperity and well-being amidst tumultuous and disruptive shifts and transitions generated by: an increasingly globalised, knowledge-intensive capitalism; global financial instability, volatility and crisis; concerns about economic, social and ecological sustainability, climate change and resource shortages; new multi-actor and multi-level systems of government "and" governance and a re-ordering of the international political economy; state austerity and retrenchment; and, new and reformed approaches to...

Geographers (and other social scientists) working in local and regional development ultimately seek to understand how and to what extent local and regional policy can positively affect economic growth and progress. This area of research and study throws up difficult and challenging questions, such as: what are the sources of regional development? And how do we account for the uneven development of regions, an apparent feature of geographical development in general, and one which seems to be reinforced by globalization?

This new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for a...