Political leaders as agents in regional development

Giuseppe Calignano () and Trond Nilsen ()
Additional contact information
Giuseppe Calignano: Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Postal: Norway
Trond Nilsen: Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Postal: Norway

No 2024/4, Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research

Abstract: The study of agency has received increasing attention in recent years. The focus on change processes at the micro-level has brought new insights into the field of regional development. However, in debates about change and regional development, agents and leaders themselves have received far less attention than agency as a process. We provide an analytical model to show how political leaders and their leadership act as drivers of change through what we call actor properties (i.e., knowledge, networks and resources). We discuss how actor properties interact with the institutional context in which leaders operate and the various transitions from a political leader's legitimacy to the legacy of their political action. Empirical investigations of two peripheral regions in Italy and Norway illustrate how political leaders act as agents of change in geographical areas characterized by different socioeconomic and institutional contexts.

Keywords: Human agency; political leaders; place-based leadership; regional development; development paths; analytical framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R00 R10 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2024-03-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/202404_calignano.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2024_004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research, Lund University, PO Box 117, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Torben Schubert ().