WANTED: PLACE-BASED POLICY
- a study circle

About this blog



We call this blog a study circle. This means that everyone takes part as an equal,  no teachers or experts are above the others. 
A study circle is a part of the Bildung tradition. (I have not found any English word for Bildung but I have seen it explained as a combination of Education, Culture and Development.) The study circle has a starting point and focus but the process is open ended.  We are not sure where you end up.



The starting point for this blog is, as on all wanted posters, a description. What do we mean when we say Place-based Policy? We are not aiming at a clear definition, just something simple that makes everyone “stay on the same page”.
PBP is a tricky concept because if you try hard you might find something that could be considered place-based in almost all policies.

WHITEWASH- WARNING!

Some people are claiming that they are practicing PBP already. But perhaps they just don't want to change anything; so they are "whitewashing". But that does not help much if you need a new progressive way of looking at regional development, a coherent policy, such as Fabrizio Barca and many others have developed.


On the other hand, in many traditional policies as well, are good place-based tools that should be honored.


The focus here should be to formulate, analyze, develop and disseminate a coherent policy that we call Place-based.
 



When we have some kind of agreement on what PBP is - the new, progressive, coherent policy, we can go on to look for and share good examples - and just as important - develop new ideas about what Place-based Policy should be in the future.



We hope that experts and researchers will help us in this quest, but definitely also the practitioners.

We hope that the writings in this blog will be simple and that it will contain ideas that are easy to apply in municipalities, agencies, organizations, governments and so on.



Everyone is welcome to comment on the writings on this blog. But if you would like to have a longer post, more like an article, you can send it to peter.j.e.backa@gmail.com. Private comments on the subject are also 
welcome!