Conclusions

In terms of the development perspective advanced in this book, dealing with preliminary and general policy implications entails the very real risk of mis­understanding which interactive processes between polity-politics-policy fundamentally advance the opportunity and capacity of LDSs to design and implement policies for SHD.

Firstly, the importance of the diversity and heterogeneity of values, interests, policy ideas and discourses within local societies, and of sub­sequent conflicting dialectics, has been recognized, emphasizing how its transformation within boundaries of social justice nurtures the creativity underlying policy evolution. Renewable diversity is therefore regarded as the main driver of evolution, together with knowledge creation and diffusion, experimentation and feedbacks loops.¹⁷

Secondly, a vision centred on pluralistic policy networks and the crucial enhancement of “systemic rationality” in the use of local and extra-local resources and programs (Helmsing, 2001) has been embraced. Finally, it has been stressed that processes of public deliberation, institution-building and collective learning constitute the fundamental basis for the inter-temporal construction of a “policy-enabling space” for SHD.

Overall, the central message of this chapter is to devote primary atten­tion to the role of (i) diversity and conflict for policy evolution, (ii) the multi-stakeholder and multilevel character of policy networks and (iii) the processes widening or restricting¹⁸ the opportunity for territorial stakehold­ers to pursue SHD. In situations of prevalent uncertainty, these processes involve a combination of behavioural routines and local experimentation, hybridization and learning, networking capacities and institutional comple­mentarity (compensation and/or reinforcement), and national coordination and global integration. In this regard, Nelson and Winter (1982, p. 31) high­light the ‘importance of highly sequential “groping” and of diffuse alertness for acquiring relevant information, the value of problem-solving heuristics, the likely scale and scope of actions recognized ex post as mistaken, and so forth.'

It follows that the construction of tailored place-based policy actions to enhance territorial enabling systems for human flourishing requires strong interaction between the academic and policymaking spheres,¹⁹ combining analytical attention to systemic processes with the articulation of top-down and bottom-up capacities for policy design, monitoring and evaluation.