About the author

Dr Glenn Athey

Glenn has spent over thirty years in local and regional economic development - as an analyst, director, advisor and consultant. He has worked inside the institutions this book is about: regional development agencies, national and city agencies, combined authorities and councils. He has sat across the table from clients, defended recommendations to elected members, seen at first hand what makes programmes succeed, and made it his profession to understand it and share it.

He has also been party to many of the mistakes and frustrations the book describes, which is part of why he wrote it. As he puts it in the preface, writing the book was an attempt to learn from them and make sense of what comes next.

His doctorate at the University of Glasgow took him inside development agencies in Scotland, London, Belfast and Berlin, researching what actually makes them effective. The answer - people, management and culture, not structures and labels - has been hardened by everything he has seen since, and it runs through Chapter 11 of this book.

He is the author of The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook (2026), the 542-page working reference for the field, and of research on policy failure and the future of growth funding for the Local Government Association and the Local Policy Innovation Partnership. He runs Athey Consulting Limited and the professional development platform economicdevelopment.world.