Designing Democratic Institutions for Collaborative Economic Development: Lessons from Belgian and Dutch Cases

Collaborative approaches to local economic development have developed in a number of European countries and other advanced economies (Giguère, in this volume). These take economic development from within public bureaucracies and relocate it to new organisational forms based on co-production between government and business, sometimes with the additional involvement of civil society associations and citizens. The resulting structures include quasi-autonomous public agencies, public–private partnership companies, multi-organisational boards and community-based organisations for neighbourhood regeneration, often operating in a multi-level environment of overlapping jurisdictions (Ansell, 2000; Heinelt and Kübler, 2005; Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002). The rationale for taking economic development out of the public bureaucracy is that it enables greater flexibility in approach because of the reduction of direct political oversight, and enhances policy design and implementation because of the engagement of non-state actors (Considine, in this volume).