The role of science, technology and innovation in local economic development

A policy Brief: National economic development policies play an important role in promoting economic growth. However, such policies have failed to evenly distribute economic activities across space. Further, they have become increasingly inadequate to tackle development challenges of specific territories as national institutions are often too remote to respond to the rapid changes and needs of localities and regions. By contrast, local institutions can be more flexible as they are better positioned to interact with local actors and take advantage of local resources. That is, local economic development (LED) emerged as a viable way to overcome local development problems with the administrative unit chosen as the main scale for the delivery of LED.

Historically, the practice of national government resembles a decadal response to
LED planning. The legislative and policy context for elevating LED to an obligatory
mandate for all South African local authorities was recognized by the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and subsequently consolidated in the 1998 White Paper on Local Government which established the notion of
‘developmental local government’ (Rogerson, 2008). The release of the national
framework for LED in 2006 by Department of Provincial and Local Government
provided definitive guidelines to local authorities for LED and was viewed as a major
step in LED planning. The introduction of ILED in 2016 contributes to the formulation of new directions for LED planning.