Contingency Planning for Local Economic Development

Local economic development has become a central concern of public policymakers. Urban, rural, and regional planners will encounter new opportunities to establish or restructure economic development planning in the years ahead. Local planners require an approach to planning for economic development that responds to the growing pressures on planning to achieve tangible results and accounts for the formidable political and financial constraints on public planning. The proposed approach—contingency planning—is presented in this paper. In the first section, contingency planning is placed in a planning theory context. In the body of the paper, the approach is described and critically discussed in the context of local economic development. After the conclusions, the practice of contingency planning is reviewed in the appendix to the paper.