What's Next in Researching Cluster Policy: Place-Based Governance for Effective Cluster Policy

Despite their immense popularity and rapid proliferation and development, local cluster policies have met mixed results, and often suffer from limited effectiveness. In this paper, we argue that an important reason for the limited success can be found in the way policies have been grafted onto a particular policy rationale, namely of “cluster building”. Responding to this critique, we propose an alternative rationale, that of “policy leverage”, and a governance model which, in the pursuit of “policy leverage”, presents a new approach to intelligence gathering and to collective strategy-making. The model assigns a key role to “civic entrepreneurs” who operate at the interfaces of public and private spheres, and, of endogenous and exogenous drives, in line with “place-based” approaches.