Leadership and Change in Sustainable Regional Development

With regions increasingly confronted with both economic difficulties and ecological problems. the issue of leadership has become more urgent than ever. Climate change, economic and demographic challenges, unrestrained urbanization, and overexploitation of natural resources all impinge on quality of life and it is now widely recognized that regions should anticipate a policy of more even and sustainable development in order to address these problems. In these efforts, the #xE2;#xAC;Shuman factor#xE2;#xAC; needs to be taken into better account and in the end, it is people who make a difference in fostering sustainable development. One of the central challenges for local and regional development studies therefore is to show how and why embedded actors become motivated and enabled to promote change. This book shows how leadership plays a crucial role in reinventing regions; but maintains that it is not a solo but a multi-agent and multi-level activity that should be discussed and studied in the context of complex networks. Indeed, leadership is shaped differently in various institutional and cultural contexts and on different scales.

Markku Sotarauta is Dean and Professor of Regional Studies at the School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland. Lummina Horlings is in the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Joyce Liddle is Professor at Teesside Business School, University of Teesside, UK.