Innovative discourse for sustainable local development: a critical ...

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Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, 2005

Innovative discourse for sustainable local development: a critical analysis of eco-industrialism Gillian Bristow School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF 10 3WA, Wales, UK E-mail: [email protected]

Peter Wells* Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF 10 3WA, Wales, UK E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: For many years, the problem to be resolved by those charged with achieving local economic development has been ‘How does this locality become competitive against other localities?’ The processes of economic and spatial integration, understood generally as globalisation, have only served to broaden the definition of those localities that could be described as competitors. Equally, the policy prescriptions that surround this discourse follow an internal logic dominated by market liberalisation in the context of creating some form of competitive advantage over other localities. The research and policy-making process involves scouring the world for examples of best practice to measure, codify, emulate and transfer. Inevitably, under this conceptualisation, most localities are doomed to fail. More recently, the concept of eco-industrialisation has come into prominence as a means to achieve sustainable local development, but again the discourse is one dominated by place promotion and a narrowly determinist interpretation of the ecology metaphor. That is, eco-industrialism as local development has been difficult to distinguish from other forms of place promotion. This paper argues that sustainable local development requires an innovative discourse predicated on the ecological metaphors of diversity, difference and ‘fit’ with unique local characterisations. It is a discourse that must reach beyond the confines of contemporary economic rationality, and in so doing lay the foundations for a radically redefined concept of local development. Keywords: discourses; regenerative eco-localism; industrial ecology; spatial competition; metaphor; eco-industrial parks. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bristow, G. and Wells, P. (2005) ‘Innovative discourse for sustainable local development: a critical analysis of eco-industrialism’, Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.168–179.

Copyright © 2005 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Innovative discourse for sustainable local development

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Biographical notes: Dr Gillian Bristow is a Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. Her research interests centre on regional economic change and development, regional governance and policy evaluation. She has written widely in the areas of regional competitiveness, rural development, integrated policy and joined-up thinking, the Structural Funds and regional government finance. She has published in a range of international and national journals including Regional Studies, Urban Studies, the Journal of Economic Geography and Environment and Planning C. She recently led an Assembly-funded study into public, private and voluntary sector partnerships in Wales, and was part of the research team which conducted the mid-term evaluations of the EU Objective one and three programmes in Wales. She also recently acted as expert advisor to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee investigation into the EU Objective One programme in Wales. Dr Peter Wells is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cardiff Business School, a Founder Member of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research and a Founder Member of the Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS). He has a particularly wide knowledge of all aspects of the automotive industry from the components and materials supply industry, through to manufacturing, R&D, distribution and marketing. In recent years, his interests in the automotive industry have become broader, such that he is now a noted expert on innovative business models to achieve sustainability. He has been instrumental in developing the Micro Factory Retailing concept as the concrete manifestation of small-scale sustainability in the industry. He has acted as a policy and strategy advisor to many private and public sector organisations including the Shell, Corus, Volvo, Toyota, UK DETR, WDA, DTI, the European Commission and UNEDO, is a regular contributor to industry and policy conferences, and has published widely on the industry. He became a Fellow of the Institute of the Motor Industry in 1996. He is currently working on forecasting the technological and organisational future of the automotive industry.

1

Introduction

In an era of large-scale and rapid shifts in the geography of industrialisation and economic prosperity, the traditional analysis and prescriptions of local and regional economic development policy premised on competitiveness appear increasingly ineffectual. The competitiveness discourse, while still the dominant foundation for policy, can be challenged in several ways: these include at a practical level the failure of such policies to deliver lasting and self-propagating economic prosperity; the paucity of ideas generated by such a development discourse; and the ways in which interlocality competition cannot end in success for all regions. Despite these and other criticisms, the competitiveness discourse remains powerful, there is a compelling brutality to the bleak inevitability of ‘compete or die’. Indeed, so deeply entrenched is the competitiveness mindset that new initiatives and ideas can rapidly be subsumed within it. This article provides a critical analysis of one such instance, where the ideas of eco-industrialism and the eco-industrial park that could, in a different policy framework, offer an alternative trajectory and content to local economic development policy appear to have been deployed largely as another modern iteration of place competition.

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G. Bristow and P. Wells

In turn, this raises a fundamental theoretical issue for industrial ecology: how does industrial ecology ‘fit’ within the debate on sustainability and capitalist economic systems? Within the analysis of business and sustainability, there is a wide spectrum of views between the two extremes of tokenism and enthusiastic pragmatism. For the tokenists, corporate entities at the microeconomic level and market economies at the macroeconomic level are seen as structurally unable to deliver sustainability and therefore any inclusion or elements of sustainability that might be found will only be temporary, incremental and palliative in character. That is, businesses are thought to be offering token gestures towards sustainability and thereby are seen to be trying to create solutions, but are in fact the ultimate cause of the problems in the first place. In broad terms, the highly critical ‘wing’ of the environmental movement has been displaced or excluded from the policy process by those seeking to enact public–private partnerships in many different forms. While the antiglobalisation protests, for example, have struck a social chord in some places and at some times (Klein, 2000; Korten, 1995, 1999), and others have advocated an overtly local perspective on policy and politics (Hines, 2000) neither have become significant features in the policy landscape. More fundamentalist positions that advocate less materialism alongside a more spiritual reconnection with the physical environment are very rare, particularly in terms of the contribution to local economic development policy – although isolated incidents do occur (McIntosh, 2002). For the enthusiastic pragmatists, corporate entities and market economies are the micro- and macroentities with the resources, structures and capabilities to make the transition to sustainability; indeed there is no other alternative short of a simple idealism that the world was not actually like this (Elkington, 2002). Hence, for industrial ecology the issue is whether the implementation of the ideas and concepts generated by this innovative framework are not simply another means of achieving so-called ‘eco-efficiency’ whereby the worst excesses are mitigated without the fundamental problems being resolved. Clearly, this is a wide-ranging debate. It might be argued that industrial ecology is reducible to a set of tools and techniques contained within an overall conceptual framework that equates the operation of human systems with those of natural systems. This may be so, but once those tools start to be deployed then they have real consequences for people, they influence decisions and outcomes, and hence can no longer be considered purely neutral or technical. The very language we use to debate the issues is charged with meaning, and in this respect the discourse on spatial development can be seen as a special instance of the more general dominance of the ‘economics paradigm’ as the basis of Western modernity (Korhonen, 2002). This article considers only one aspect of this complex debate, the spatial economic development policy centred on the concept of the eco-industrial park. Section 2 provides an account of spatial economic development policy, necessarily brief, which highlights the reductionism inherent in the practice of interlocality competition. No attempt is made to define terms such as local, regional or community; rather, it is recognised that spatial development policies operate over various geographic scales. In any case, the specific focus of the article is that of the eco-industrial park, which is by definition a small geographic space nested within a locality such as a town or city. Again it is shown that several versions of the eco-industrial concept have emerged over time (Roberts, 2004). As a result, somewhat more attention is devoted to those policies that have been based on a small geographic area.


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Thereafter, more detailed consideration is given to the eco-industrial park concept and the deployment of the concept into the policy arena. This analysis is not so much about the functionality of eco-industrial parks as it is about the positioning of the concept against the established practice and discourse of spatial economic development policy. Following on from these two major review sections, the third section enters a more speculative and theoretical dimension with some reflections on the scope for alternatives to the competitiveness paradigm premised on the theme of sustainability and informed by the conceptual basis of industrial ecology. Indeed, it is further argued that the eco-industrial park offers an opportunity not so far embraced to redefine the ‘development’ and ‘competition’ discourse. Inevitably, this process would involve the politicisation of industrial ecology, just as it would involve exposing the ideological content of the apparently neutral and immutable competitiveness discourse. The article concludes with some suggestions for further theoretical development and empirical research.

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Spatial economic development policy: a brief history

For many years, the problem to be resolved by those charged with achieving local economic development has been “How does this locality become competitive against other localities?” (Bristow, 2005). The processes of economic and spatial integration, understood generally as globalisation, have only served to broaden the definition of those localities that could be described as competitors. Equally, the policy prescriptions that surround this discourse follow an internal logic dominated by market liberalisation in the context of creating some form of competitive advantage over other localities (Porter, 1990, 1995). The research and policy-making process involves scouring the world for examples of best practice to measure, codify, emulate and transfer. Inevitably, under this conceptualisation, most localities are doomed to fail because it is not possible for everyone to be a ‘winner’. Indeed, it might be contended that the primary purpose of much of spatial economic development policy has been to redress the consequences of locality ‘failure’ caused by the operation of market forces as major companies, and even entire industries, are swept away. For decades the approach to spatial economic development policy has been to enhance local competitiveness at the same time as the scale of spatial competition has inexorably widened. In general terms, local and subsequently national economies have become less insular, more integrated into the emergent global economic system. Through a combination of internal political changes and international agreements such as those negotiated by the World Trade Organisation more countries have been drawn into the market economy framework. The formerly isolationist countries such as those comprising Communist Eastern Europe, China and India continue to follow a process of ‘liberalisation’ to attract investment, find markets for their products and services and achieve economic growth to deliver material prosperity. In crude terms, if we consider the question of spatial economic development policy in the UK over the last 50 years the trends are evident. In the era after the 1939–1945 war, notwithstanding the reconstruction efforts due to war damage mainly in the London and surrounding areas, the main focus of policy was one of rebalancing economic growth across the various regions. In particular, policy sought to attract and retain investment into the ‘peripheral’ and disadvantaged regions such as the North East of England, Scotland and Wales. It could

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be argued, therefore, that a region such as Wales was mainly in competition with other peripheral UK regions, particularly in terms of attracting inward investment. The process of European integration somewhat changed this perspective. The stages that culminated in the establishment of the European Union and the development of policies designed to redress spatial–structural imbalances in the pan-European economy inevitably meant that interplace competition became played out on a larger, European stage. Wales found itself competing with Alsace, southern Italy or Portugal. European enlargement and the inclusion of some countries with low levels of economic development have meant that, comparatively, Wales is no longer a priority for spatial economic policy. At the same time, countries around the world have been active in dismantling barriers to the movement of goods and capital (if not people) and this has given manufacturing and service businesses both new production locations and new markets. As a consequence, in a very real sense places such as Wales are now in competition with India and China. Local economic development policy has also gone through several generations whereby an example of good practice or an instance of a strong local economy is identified, analysed and replicated (usually in a somewhat altered form). It is interesting to note that in most (all?) cases the original examples emerge without the benefit of deliberate policy guidance, and in many cases the role of policy in other locations is to seek to simulate and stimulate the conditions that underpinned the paradigm case. A good example, widely replicated in many locations, is that of ‘Silicon Valley’ in California. This has resulted in the replication of a high technology, electronics and software nexus in other silicon places such as ‘Silicon Glen’ in Scotland. In practice, of course, there were and are substantive differences between California and Scotland that resulted in a quite different character between the electronics industries of the two places. While Silicon Valley was nurtured by huge government spending on military and aerospace, and enjoyed the support of a strong venture capital presence that proliferated spin-off businesses, Scotland clearly lacked these attributes. As a consequence, Silicon Glen lacked the self-regenerative growth capacity or resilience of Silicon Valley, and largely became home to low value-added electronic assembly operations vulnerable to cost competition from other locations around the world. Other more specifically ‘local’ economic development policies attempted over the years have included: •

industrial estates with pre-built facilities intended for high-growth light industry

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growth poles or technopoles (based on, e.g. Toulouse aerospace companies)

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science and technology parks (spin-offs from universities)

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enterprise zones (deregulated tax havens).

In all these cases, a discrete and small spatial area has been designated as the arena within which policy unfolded. The spatial logic of location concentration has not always been evident: the businesses that occupied Enterprise zones needed no relationship or linkage with other businesses in the zone for example. In the case of science parks, technology parks, biotechnology parks and so forth, however, there was often an implicit notion that mutual interlinkages would reinforce the competitiveness of the individual companies and hence of the locality itself. As with other forms of spatial development policy, the idea that firms compete has been superficially applied to the idea that places compete


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when clearly there are many differences between them that make ‘place competition’ concepts problematic. This is a treatment that owes much to the intervention of those with a business and economics background, notably of course Porter (1980, 1985, 1990, 1995).

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Spatial economic development policy and eco-industrialism

More recently, the concept of eco-industrialisation has come into prominence as a means to achieve sustainable local or regional development, but again the discourse is one dominated by place promotion and a narrowly determinist interpretation of the ecology metaphor. In the Dutch example, it is the combination of government and private sector in a cooperative strategy that is held to underpin the basis of competitiveness, albeit in the contemporary incarnation of eco-modernism (Brand and Bruijn, 1999). More recently, a more critical view has emerged in which eco-industrialism as local development has been seen as difficult to distinguish from other forms of place promotion (Deutz and Gibbs, 2004). Still, the ‘wealth from waste’ perspective has gained considerable presence in the policy arena, with many keen to emphasise the potential contribution to sustainable development (Roberts, 2004). It is interesting to note that, as with the traditional spatial development policies outlined above, the paradigm example from which the eco-industrial park concept initially emerged was created without overt policy intervention – though there was subsequent intervention by local government. The Kalundberg example in Denmark has inevitably shaped the theoretical understanding of what constitutes an eco-industrial park, or those features of an existing geoindustrial landscape that are potential proto-eco-industrial parks, configurations that are the most amenable to transformation into an eco-industrial park. The industrial ecology concept, imbued with the ethos of partnerships, stakeholders and networking and dialogue (Clayton et al., 2002) has innate appeal to those in the economic policy arena, not least because it provides them with a functional part to play. Again, earlier work in this area has sought to emphasise the sometimes pivotal part played by public institutions in building industrial ecology capacity at the local level (Burstrom and Korhonen, 2001) if only to serve their own concerns with respect to municipal waste management. At one level, the eco-industrial park represents a modern technofix for policy makers seeking to concretise the rhetoric of sustainability. The most appealing aspect here for local policy makers, particularly in the context of governmental targets on reductions in landfill, is the prospect that an organised eco-industrial park will minimise waste flows. Furthermore, the attainment of waste reduction will also reduce costs for firms on the eco-industrial park, while spatial contiguity reduces transport costs for such material flows. Interestingly, recent ‘eco-park’ developments in Wales have been expressly established to reduce landfill: set up on land previously used for municipal or industrial waste are businesses whose main function is to process those wastes into commercial products. In a recent review, Roberts (2004) identifies five models or types of environmental industry clusters, growth poles or business parks: •

clusters of companies gaining external agglomeration economies while engaged in the production of environmental products, for example, wind turbines

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clusters to facilitate the processing of waste and ‘secondary raw materials’

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•

custers that transfer waste products between the participants (i.e. the Kalundborg model)

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geographic or virtual clusters based on a common service or support function, for example, environmental/legal consultants

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local attempts to introduce ‘responsible care’ by affected industries, for example, in chemicals production.

In addition, the eco-industrial park offers the opportunity to meet other policy targets. With respect to these targets the theme of competitiveness is again important. In terms of place marketing competitiveness, the eco-industrial park may be seen by policy makers as conferring a Unique Selling Proposition for those engaged in place marketing, a means of distinguishing their location from the many others vying for the attentions of potential investors. The deepening of the density of flows in the eco-industrial park and the growth in complexity of the park has some resonance with both ‘clusters’ concepts and with networks or clusters approaches to economic development. Generally, the networks approach has been closely associated with emergent new technologies such as electronics and, more recently, biotechnology or nanotechnology (Tracey and Clark, 2003). Networking and interdependence are generally seen as fundamental to the working definition of the eco-industrial park (Deutz and Gibbs, 2004). Still, the idea of the more spatially extensive eco-industrial network at a regional level has been pursued in, for example, Germany. Again there are overlaps here with existing and more traditional policy initiatives to support local supply chain development. One potential problem with the eco-industrial park concept is that generally the idea is centred on one major economic entity, a single firm or large plant. Typically, the idea lends itself best to process or extractive industries – precisely those most exposed to commodification and the pressures of international trade. While this application to large and locally critical businesses has some resonance with the idea of a ‘keystone’ species within a local ecosystem, in practice the communities that depend upon dominant corporate entities are inevitably vulnerable should that entity fail. Again, the idea of the company town is not new and in some of the earlier manifestations had many of the features of sustainable economic development policy that might be fostered in the modern era (albeit under a paternalistic framework, often with an overtly religious base), but a critical weakness beyond the constrictions of paternalism was the devastation brought to many such communities when the dominant business failed. In the operational deployment of industrial ecology principles, however, there is evidence that the creation of interdependencies and a shared destiny within a complex network of companies and other organisational entities in the private and public sector is proving more difficult to realise. There may be conflicts with corporate policies on procurement criteria for quality and cost, for example, or there may be unwillingness from a strategic perspective to become dependent upon another firm. The most fundamental criticism is that the eco-industrial park is simply another manifestation or the most recently fashionable iteration of place competition and is therefore inevitably doomed to replicate all of the weaknesses and problems experienced with previous iterations. That is, there is nothing substantially new about the eco-industrial park, and at its most cynical it is nothing more than relabelling and


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rebranding of timeworn practices. Worse, the eco-industrial park concept subverts the hope and content of sustainability, reducing it to a slightly less wasteful form of ‘normal’ industrial development. Indeed, it could be argued that philosophically, industrial ecology lends itself to this rather conservative treatment. The focus on process and flows, rather than issues such as ownership, wealth distribution and fit within wider economic structures, means that it is relatively straightforward to regard industrial ecology as a set of tools and practices only. The consequence is that these tools are arbitrarily applied to the same old policy target of enhancing local competitiveness.

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Alternatives to the competitiveness discourse: regenerative eco-localism

Conceptually, the only real alternative to competitiveness is self-reliant development, at least in narrowly economic terms. It is clearly the case that in order to be sustainable a business has to be profitable – or there is no business at all. If, however, economic policy is transmuted to sustainable development policy, then the basis for intervention and the evaluation of success can both change. That is, there would be potentially many more aspects to consider, both in terms of the economics of local development and the wider social and environmental issues. Some work on eco-industrialism recognises the need for a more ‘extended’ approach (Korhonen, 2001; Wells, 2004). There is, for example, the potential for eco-industrial parks to support and enhance the significance of factors other than economics (notably cultural and social forces) that underpin sustainable development and thereby provide a mechanism to localise sustainability (Parto, 2000). As a simple example of ‘extension’ at the economic level, just as ecosystems are about the cycling of materials within and between organisms, so an eco-industrial system could be about the cycling of wealth – an aspect not considered in the existing industrial ecology literature at all. The existing literature is all about physical stocks and flows of materials and energy, with the overall policy prescription seeking to minimise the consumption of finite resources both by reduction in use and by increased material efficiency through various forms of waste-to-wealth or closed loop recycling. Yet, the abstraction of wealth from localities has long been one of the most pernicious and unsustainable aspects of economic development. A policy target could therefore be one of increasing the amount and proportion of wealth circulated within the local economy. Such a policy would confront directly the question of ‘screwdriver’ factories where the only local added value consists in the labour content of final assembly for products whose component parts are often shipped hundreds of miles and whose output can equally be distributed to remote markets. Profits generated by such factories, which because they are ‘footloose’ are often the target of traditional place promotion efforts, are equally abstracted from the locality. Moreover, localities often feel the need to offer tax incentives to corporations such that any locally declared profits are still not captured for local benefit. Of course, there are efforts to capture greater economic benefit from this sort of investment – many local economic development offices include staff whose function it is to secure business for local suppliers. Ironically, such policies may only serve to increase dependency upon one or two major corporate investments in a locality. It is pertinent to note that such observations have been made with respect to economic policy, where it has been argued by Tisdel (2004) that policies designed to increase

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business competition and a narrow pursuit of economic efficiency can result in making local industries highly vulnerable to exogenous economic change. Extending this general argument to embrace other issues of sustainability, then policy targets could include diversity and the relationship between economic structures and local characteristics (see also Korhonen, 2001). In broad terms, this means adopting a perspective that we have termed regenerative eco-localism. This involves adapting and applying the essential idea that policy with respect to locality should seek to create robust, self-reinforcing communities that share the characteristics of a local ecosystem. These characteristics in terms of ecosystems can be, for example, diversity and fit within local environmental features such as climate. Thus, a biofuel solution might be appropriate to afforested rural Finland, but in windswept Wales makes little sense as the basis of a local energy policy. Diversity at the ecosystem level has a definite meaning, and refers to the richness of the mixture of species occupying myriad niches. Such ecosystem diversity is seen as conferring certain benefits including robustness in the face of externally induced change; checks and balances within the ecosystem to prevent large fluctuations in species’ populations; maximum efficiency in the capture and utilisation of natural resources; and a broad base to provide the platform for a renewal of the ecosystem in the event of a large change. This list of attributes, if translated into the local economic environment, would be equally beneficial. The difficulties emerge in defining diversity in an economic sense, and then developing a policy framework that fosters the creation and sustenance of diversity. Tisdel (2004) devotes considerable attention to the theoretical interplay between ecology and economics around notions of competition, mutualism and speciation but also notes that the analogy is only partially applicable. Economics and ecology share some metaphorical language in a manner that has been beneficial to both, from Charles Darwins’ Origin of the Species to Milton Friedmans’ competition yielding the survival of the fittest. Alternatively, firms are not living entities but human–social constructs. Nonetheless, as noted above in the discussion on company towns, where an industrial monoculture exists so does economic vulnerability. Entire towns or even regions can be left stranded by the demise of key industrial sectors, as has happened with the traditional heavy industries of coal mining, steel and shipbuilding. Diversity at economic policy level therefore seems to imply at least two fundamental characteristics: spread across a range of sectors; and relatively small scale such that no one sector or company becomes locally dominant. The relationship with local characteristics also has clear meaning in an ecosystem sense, but rather more ambiguity in an economic sense. To some extent, diversity at an ecosystem level, or differences in the species composition of various ecosystems, derive from and reinforce differences in the local physical environment. These differences may include the topography, climate, latitude, soil structure and age of the physical environment. While some species are to found across a wide range of habitats, others are highly localised within a limited range. Such combinations give rise to a typically variegated earth surface. The translation of this concept to the theme of local sustainability is again a challenging one, but also one with potential. For example, it might be considered that economic activity could in various ways ‘fit’ with local cultural and social norms, and indeed even with the local physical environment. In the typical interlocality competition situation, a locality may invite in and become host to what are effectively ‘alien species’. Beyond these points with respect to economic policy, however, it is worth noting that the concept of sustainable development contains within it the implication that there is


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more to life than economic rationality. That is, even economic policy is about the quality of jobs as much as the quantity and, beyond this, useful employment is only part of a fulfilling life, and arguably a rather minor part. Of course, it is only necessary to observe the ridicule meted out to those who propose using productivity gains to shorten the working week to realise that, as with the competitiveness discourse, views on work and material consumption are deeply entrenched. Certainly, these aspects of sustainability cannot be explored in the context of this paper, which of necessity is focussed on the economic issues. Despite this, we would argue that those other issues should ultimately be within the remit of sustainable local economic policy because ultimately this is about creating and supporting people within an area such that they are able to enjoy a prosperous, healthy, secure and rewarding life. In this regard, there is merit in the view proposed by Korhonen (2001) that time is also an aspect of the ecological metaphor that could be extended, arguing that the pace of change should be slow. Certainly, for some communities battered by the storms of global economic change a slower pace of change allows more time to adjust and react, and therefore makes the whole economy more sustainable. Alternatively, however, some communities have been locked into economic stasis, regions such as the South Wales coalfield simply have not recovered from the widespread pit closures of over 20 years ago and doubtless would welcome a faster rate of change. Perhaps a more fundamental aspect of time in ecological systems that would merit further attention and replication is that of the ways in which activity (including populations of species) change over time. While not strictly within the remit of industrial ecology or eco-industrial park design, it is perhaps relevant to a consideration to sustainability to have economic structures that do not depend upon the rigid control of output over time – almost regardless of demand. Rarely does the place competition perspective allow for the notion of self-reliance. Indeed, the competition perspective is cemented by the theme of interlocality dependence in various forms. Even the most ‘competitive’ location achieves that status by winning employment and activities from other locations, and therefore by exporting goods and services to those other locations. Put another way, there is a dialectic relationship here whereby the successful location needs and depends upon the markets of other locations. Hence, we find that we are concerned if, say, the US economy enters a period of low economic growth or if the value of the dollar falls too low, because of the negative effect on our own locations. Globalisation therefore brings a form of vulnerability even for successful locations. Alternatively, self-reliance and self-generating economic systems are not promoted as policy aims but could offer all sorts of emancipation: political, social, cultural and economic. Strangely, one of the countries with the most isolationist stance is probably the US – which through its consumption and production patterns is the single largest influence on global economic conditions. In fact, vulnerability and dependence because of petroleum imports now features within the Homeland Security agenda that has emerged as a response to the perceived terrorist threat and new cold war climate after the events of September 2001.

5

Conclusions

The contention here is that sustainable local development requires an innovative discourse predicated on the ecological metaphors of diversity, difference and ‘fit’ with

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unique local characterisations (Wells and Nieuwenhuis, 2005). It is a discourse that must reach beyond the confines of contemporary economic rationality, and in so doing lay the foundations for a radically redefined concept of local development. Regenerative eco-localism does not suppose that there must be a return to some semi-rural idyll under which eco-industrial practices are those premised on the characteristic vegetative, mineral and animal output of a locality. Such a return to agrarianism is clearly unrealistic given the size and distribution of human populations. Alternatively, an interesting feature of contemporary economic development is that it often provides rather dense concentrations of employment in factories or offices, so dense in fact that those who work there may have to travel long distances from their homes. It is possible, even likely, that eco-industrialism of the sort we are advocating here would be dispersed both in terms of the scale of capital, but also geographically. Once again then, scale is likely to be an issue. Just as the scale of capital investment is important, so is that of human settlement: as much contemporary ‘footprint’ analysis has shown, dense and affluent urban concentrations actually depend upon a very large spatial area to support consumption patterns (Collins et al., 2005). Regenerative eco-localism is emphatically not another version of place promotion wherein the primary claim is ‘It’s a nice place to live’. Clearly, many local and regional development strategies take such an approach when the physical environment is considered to form an attractive backcloth to the otherwise normal processes of attracting and retaining investment. It is likely, however, that there is a constant tension between the need to preserve this attractive environment and the need to allow economic growth – and with it, new construction, population growth and so forth. Few ideas are as deeply entrenched as that of the importance of competitiveness. It pervades many aspects of contemporary society, and has eclipsed all alternative discourses. As such, it is impossible to challenge the hegemony of the competitiveness discourse; however, relentless and unyielding it may be. Despite this, it is also evident that place competition is a barren and bleak prospect. Eco-industrialism could be the first step in sidestepping the competitiveness agenda, a means of creating economies that are insulated from exogenous change, and hence one of the basic foundations of a sustainable society.

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