LOCAL DEVELOPMENT IN IRELAND Partnership, Innovation and Social Justice LOCAL ECONOMIC AND EMPLOYMENT DEVELOPMENT ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT FOREWORD

When I was appointed as Minister for European Affairs and Local Development, I felt that it was important to have the benefit of objective international expertise in order to help us realise the full potential of the local development initiatives that have been established in the past few years. Knowing of the work of the OECD and the importance that it attaches to the concept of local development, I was pleased that the LEED Programme took up my suggestion to undertake this study. The OECD report will make a significant contribution to the process of self-evaluation and further development of policy in the field of local development, not only in Ireland but also elsewhere in the OECD. I welcome the analysis of the strengths of innovative partnership structures in promoting economic development and combating unemployment at the local level. The Irish government will reflect carefully on the lessons to be learned from this analysis. I hope that it will be of equal value to those seeking to tackle the major challenges of our time through similar policy innovations. FOREWORD by the OECD Secretariat In an increasingly complex and interdependent world, many of the issues governments have to address-ranging from improving economic competitiveness to fighting unemployment and combating social exclusion-have an important spatial element. Because national macroeconomic and structural policies alone are unable to manage this diversity, policies addressing specific issues in target areas are needed to complement and reinforce the traditional range of policy instruments. As well as improving the efficiency of public policymaking, area-based approaches also permit policies to be more socially inclusive and help ensure the social stability and cohesion without which economic growth and structural adjustment will be obstructed. In recognition of this, the OECD Council created the Territorial Development Service, which brings together units dealing with local, regional, rural and urban policy issues. Thus, the initiatives of the Irish government reviewed in this report are consistent with, and even exemplify, trends in policy analysis within the OECD. It is in this context that the Local Employment and Economic Development (LEED) Programme of the Territorial Development Service took up the request of Mr. Gay Mitchell, T.D., Minister for European Affairs and Local Development, to assess Ireland's local development experiments. Over the past few years, the Irish Government has introduced a series of institutional innovations aimed particularly at reducing the incidence and mitigating the effects of long-term unemployment. …