This paper reflects on the evolution of place-based governance from a long-term (15 year) study of rural development initiatives undertaken in a region of Poland as part of its accession to the European Union. It decomposes the recursive process of institutional learning arising from initiatives for heritage preservation and rural economic development. In the analysis, a typology of unavoidable development dilemmas is elaborated that must be explicitly managed in order to allow place-based governance to effectively harness the cultural value, social context, and developmental needs of certain locales or landscapes. Although creating and sustaining local value remain contingent on broader realities of governance, proactive management of these dilemmas can help prevent many of the usual contestations around goals and identity from becoming intractable in later periods. The proposed approach to enabling place-based governance emphasizes conflict recognition and engagement as important complements to more common prescriptive models of governance.

Feuer, H.N., Van Assche, K., Hernik, J., Czesak, B. & Różycka-Czas, R. (2020) Evolution of place-based governance in the management of development dilemmas: long-term learning from Małopolska, Poland, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2020.1820314