Introduction
Sustainable Human Development (SHD) at the local level, being a placebased and people-centred approach (as described in Chapter 1), entails complex and dynamic processes, which cannot be easily framed within static, sectoral or mono-dimensional analytical frameworks.
The creation and enhancement of territorial enabling and disabling factors for SHD and iterative processes of systemic change involve the continuous interaction of different elements through non-linear feedback loops. The territorial character of these processes does not prevent the identification of general rules or mechanisms along the trajectories of capability expansion (or reduction) and local SHD. This underlines the importance of having a consistent and flexible framework capable of providing tailored and relevant analytical accounts and guiding policy strategies.The objective of this chapter is to present a new interpretative framework - the Sustainable Territorial Evolution for Human Development (STEHD) framework - to explore the territorial dynamics of SHD processes, building on previous theoretical elaborations from the different strands of the literature on the CA and on local development. We conceive of each territory as an evolving complex population system (Hodgson and Knudsen, 2010), and focus on the process of creating enabling factors (and eliminating disabling factors) at the territorial level. Particular emphasis is placed on the interaction of these factors with social and economic life at community level, participation and, ultimately, individual capability set.
The STEHD framework is conceived as multilevel, multidimensional, complex and evolutionary. It can be applicable to different territorial systems, embracing - and not sidelining - their complexity. In order to identify policy targets and tailor strategies within a common framework consistent with the expansion of individuals' and social groups' capabilities at the local level, the objective is to frame the social, economic, institutional and cultural characteristics of each context as primary determinants of an endogenous development process. In other words, the STEHD framework aims to disentangle the combination of different elements (stakeholders and agents, resources, barriers, institutions, capacities, participation spaces and political willingness) that shape the evolutionary processes of, and territorial patterns for, SHD.
These processes involve the sustainable economic, social and environmental expansion of individual and collective capabilities as well as the active participation of individuals in decision-making processes.The chapter is divided into five sections, including this introduction. In the second section, the main components and characteristics of the STEHD framework are introduced. The framework is initially presented from a static perspective, focusing on the elements and functionings that characterize Local Development System (LDS) where human beings live and interact. Then, in order to capture the complexity of development processes and pathways, it is enriched by moving towards an evolutionary perspective and economic geography perspective (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Boschma and Martin, 2007; Frenken, 2007), emphasizing the role of feedback loops among different components of the framework.
In the third section, the territorial focus of the STEHD framework is presented, in order to examine the complexity of place-based human development, showing how the territorial system's enabling or disabling factors are determined.
The fourth section explores the possible applications of the STEHD framework for the analysis of different development processes and identifies the main questions entailed in its procedural application to case studies.
In the concluding section, the main findings are revisited. In addition, four possible methodologies for making our STEHD framework operational and modeling SHD at the local level are described in Appendix 2.1 at the end of this chapter.
2.2