Old industrial areas
Old industrial and mining areas: the added value of local employment development
Old industrial and mining areas tend to suffer the problems that go with intractable unemployment and economic restructuring. Unemployment and social exclusion dominate the policy agenda, with a constant drive to establish new economic sectors that can take up the excess labour supply. Poverty and social exclusion, housing blight and other forms of deterioration in the living environment and urban fabric are widely observed features of these sorts of regions. Significantly for most of these regions, a history of heavy industry and of large firm dominance has denied them a tradition of local entrepreneurship and small independent enterprise. Their skill pools have been rooted in the traditional industries – leaving older but potentially active workers exposed to exclusion in the face of an inability to adapt in the face of change.
The continuing need for a physical and economic regeneration of these areas, and the fact that their problems give them a high political profile, makes gives them a history of policy initiatives and state schemes. Partnerships and associations are normally well developed – many having been brought into existence to service one or another local development initiative in the struggle against unemployment. These sorts of regions provide a very particular environment for local employment and development actions by virtue of both the depth and longevity of their economic and social problems and the complexity of the administrative and governance structures that have grown up out of long histories of attempts to deal with them.
Policy Context
The overall policy objective for these regions has been to find ways to re-position them away from the traditional sectors in decline and to install new drivers for economic growth. Diversification of the economic base has been the first-order policy objective and the aim has been two-fold: attract inward investment in new growth oriented sectors and boost indigenous potential – particularly through boosting levels of entrepreneurship and SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) development.
Increasingly, old industrial areas are finding themselves having to depend on locally creative ways to reveal their own intrinsic value to the national and international marketplace. There is a new climate of creativity that is spawning new forms of entrepreneurship alongside old. While there is entrepreneurship of a more recognisable form in the SME and social enterprise sectors, there is also enhanced innovation coming forward in urban design, in the arts and cultural industries, in community development, in policy design and in trying out of new local forms of governance.
Acting locally in these regions usually implies not just pursuing local area based activities in deprived neighbourhoods but finding ways to add a more local dimension to any or all of the following policies:
- Inward investment
- Sectoral clustering and the promotion of inter-firm networks
- SME development and entrepreneurship
- New technology and innovation strategies
Lessons from Experience
What the IDELE findings show, above all, is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to what is needed locally or otherwise to revive old industrial and mining regions. New governance structures have to be devised and put in place, new routes to job and enterprise creation devised and creative ways to integrate those most excluded from work brought into activity. What IDELE shows with great clarity is that local specificity is both inevitable and desirable. What works in one locality cannot be transferred in some context-free way to another no matter how similar. This does not, of course, mean that lessons cannot be learned and experiences shared. What it does mean is that there are two components to the IDELE process. The first is about recovering general lessons from best practice examples and the second is about allowing for and learning about the customisation of those ideas to meet the local situation of the recipient. Only interaction and dialogue of the kind that IDELE practices as part of its root philosophy can ensure that both are taken on board and simplistic policy prescriptions are avoided.
Conclusions
- Traditional, centrally-driven policy approaches that have sought to diversify old industrial and mining areas increasingly need to be complemented by local approaches that are better customised to the specific needs and opportunities of an area.
- These local approaches should not rely solely on attracting inward investment and reducing factor costs of production. There is also a need to create a positive ‘message’ for a locality based on people, lifestyle, civic and cultural factors.
- Such ‘messages’ are increasingly important where sporting entertainment, leisure and tourism events and facilities are taking over the role of more traditional investment.
- Key challenges are to create open and fluid forms of governance, encourage a local culture of enterprise and entrepreneurship and customise or create insertion programmes suitable to the specific needs of an area.
- New forms of governance for effective local employment development include: associations, alliances, partnerships and joint ventures. These approaches can be built on the rich tradition of civil society, strong sense of community and local loyalty that often exists in such areas.
- Such new forms of governance in areas with a long history of ‘initiatives’ should address the proliferation of local actors and partnerships by co-ordinating or rationalising current delivery mechanisms. In areas with little experience, the emphasis should be on building capacity to undertake local employment development.
- In areas traditionally dominated by a single industry employer there is a need to create a culture of entrepreneurship and enterprise. This can be encouraged by social enterprises, training programmes that offer routes into entrepreneurship and the arrival of immigrants or outsiders with an aptitude and appetite for entrepreneurship.
- Partnership approaches can encourage local SMEs to cooperate, where they supply national and international, rather than local markets and are thus not direct competitors.
- Partnership approaches can also reduce the fixed costs of SMEs by enabling the sharing of techniques, technologies, management and communication tools and human resources, as well as facilitating access to finance.
- Mainstream programmes of national public employment services can be made more effective by drawing in local partnership bodies that can make such programmes more sensitive to local needs.
- Training and employment programmes need to offer routes into entrepreneurship as well as employment in order to help create new jobs.
- Long-term unemployed people in old industrial areas may be particularly ‘distant’ from the labour market and yet may have already passed through a series of ‘revolving door’ schemes. Local approaches should offer new routes into employment that start ‘further back’ than mainstream programmes
