6.1 Introduction: Going behind policy recommendations
Affirming that a Sustainable Human Development (SHD) perspective provides the coordinates for understanding the economic and social evolution of local development systems entails a fundamental policy question: are development policies able to address locally determined conversion factors, in order to foster processes of SHD evolution and change?
Within an international panorama that urgently needs policy innovations to face long-standing processes of crisis1 and recession, there can be no single model to guide SHD policies at the local level.
Instead, such a model depends on territorial needs, development processes, historical and institutional features, social values and the availability of resources. The ability of scholars and practitioners to debate and rely on integrated visions of development in their policy accounts, going beyond the separation of "economic” from "social” discourse, is undoubtedly crucial.The objective of this chapter is to explore a "policy-enabling space” that challenges standardized place- and time-neutral approaches and embraces a territorial perspective that seeks to maximize local development potential and can help design tailor-made institutions and investments (Barca et al., 2012). The policy objective (derived from previous chapters) is to enable the local system function in order to increase local well-being through the expansion of people's capabilities, that is, to enhance territorial enabling systems for human flourishing. Thus, policy design and assessment needs to be related to processes and feedback loops in the constitutive elements of the Sustainable Territorial Evolution for Human Development (STEHD) framework, from resources (access and distribution), capacities and institutions, to spaces for dialogue, political willingness, par- ticipation/empowerment and accountability. A similar policy perspective thus allows rethinking development policies on equity, sustainability, participation and productivity, as well as on skills or technological upgrading, job creation, innovation and infrastructural provision, to consistently foster active participation and expansion of the capabilities of local citizens, firms and social groups.
It is important to emphasize that this chapter does not intend to provide an exhaustive discussion of policy implications at different levels (local, national or international), as they depend on the context and the circumstances under which the policy is going to be established (Sepulveda and Amin, 2006).2 Instead, we focus, in the second section, on how diversity and conflicts drive policy evolution towards - or away from - SHD trajectories. Building on this, the third section examines how processes of public interaction and deliberation, institution building and collective learning along horizontal and vertical lines of articulation widen (or restrict) the "policy-enabling space” to remove (or generate) binding constraints and mobilize local potential for SHD. The final section concludes, while Appendix 6 discusses the main issues related to the evaluation of complex and context-based development programs.
6.2