Editors’ introduction

This new journal is launching at a pivotal time in our history – with a global pandemic and racial injustices and unrest proliferating – locally focused and sponsored development to improve societies at the community level is very relevant. Local Development & Society has been on the drawing board for several years and emerged as an interdisciplinary, broad-based publishing outlet. We are pleased to announce that the journal is partnering with Taylor & Francis and the Community Development Society (www.comm-dev.org) to help disseminate scholarship and reviews of successful practices around the world. We are international in scope, not in terms of considering country-level analysis, but rather focusing on innovative research and applications developed locally but focusing on improving or understanding issues, challenges, and opportunities that confront communities and their cultures and societies world-wide as they accommodate changing demographic trends.

The aims and scope of the journal include:

Locally focused issues continue to emerge rapidly with key interest by the public, nonprofit, and even private sectors as well as by citizen groups seeking to encourage more healthy and sustainable sources of livelihoods, culture, and foods in their communities and regions. Policy applications include all sectors of the economy including business, health, transportation, housing, local finance, and other issues involved with population trends. These discussions should focus on innovative ways and practices that local governments can accommodate them. Many trends are world-wide so analyses with broad applications while recognizing local issues while not focusing on one country or specific set of circumstance are especially welcome.

At the same time, local systems connote changes in social and economic systems (participation, empowerment, health impacts, livelihoods, and other economic impacts), and vice versa. Simply put, localization is the process of adapting or adopting changes in a product, content, process, or policy for a specific area or locale. Local Development & Society brings together these domains across social and economic systems while focusing on applications in new settings.

Interest in localism is on the rise around the world and we plan to create a repository of cross-disciplinary academic and applied research in local contexts that will be integrated with national, provincial, state, and community practices. The journal will explore potentials and limitations of local growth and test evidence from academic research and practice against relevance to local societies. It supports theoretical and empirical research in a diversity of local contexts, with the aim of strengthening universities and organizations that produce research about communities’ development and society.

Of special interest is research with documentation on innovative and promising practices that have been used successfully in helping to rebuild local economies following a recession or national crisis. The research should examine policies used and analyze them in terms of academic and practitioner research to illustrate how the effective practices have used previous research findings. Authors submitting manuscripts should base their presentations on analyses, rather than case studies, since the purpose of the journal is to help both researchers and practitioners generalize the findings to new applications.

While not essential in every instance, the journal attaches significance to documented results and proven outcomes. Hypothesis testing is encouraged, especially when the results lead to improved policy applications. Since the readership is broad-based, it is important that presentations are written in non-technical way so as to be understood by scholars and practitioners trained in many fields.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to planning, geography, economics, sociology, public administration, business, and other disciplines. The scope is global and of interest to diverse social scientists, planners, researchers, policy makers, students, and practitioners. While this journal builds on Community Development, the journal published by the Community Development Society, it is interdisciplinary in scope and encourages scholarship on the broad expanse of local development and society. We encourage you to explore the website that provides additional information as well as the link for submissions. The site is at the following web address: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rlds20.

Special importance will be placed on new and innovative applications of well-documented techniques that encourage participation by broad sectors of the community which traditionally have not been directly engaged in policy development. The applications discussed should have resulted in stronger links between local development in the broad sense and successful policy applications that led to better outcomes for the community.

We are pleased to announce our inaugural editorial board available on the website. With members from across the globe and a variety of disciplinary and practice specialties, this board will help foster understanding and awareness of locally focused development and societies. Section editors in issues relating to land/natural/environmental resources, local foods, arts and culture, and social enterprise/entrepreneurship help strengthen the journal’s offerings. The editorial team includes Sofia Kotsiri as Managing Editor, Patsy Kraeger as Special Issues Editor, and Craig Talmage as Reviews Editor. Note that the journal accepts a variety of manuscript types: original research, case studies, and perspectives or overview articles. In addition, the Reviews Section will provide reviews of books, policies, programs, or organizational initiatives. These submissions will come from both academic scholars and from practitioners and submissions will be peer-reviewed and/or refereed.

Each issue presents a variety of articles, along with a review and an invited guest essay. This inaugural issue is quite special with an essay by Kimber Lanning, who has lifted up the cause and issues of locally focused development via her work with Local First Arizona and related organizations. Striving to keep local businesses and organizations at the heart of community economies, she has influenced many efforts to consider the impacts of their buying and sourcing habits. The essay brings to light several inherent and structural challenges along with strategies for addressing these needs by improving local economies.

The issue continues with original research articles and a case study. Gary Green’s work in rural America has brought attention to issues that are prevalent in rural communities. Because of Covid-19, several articles focus on the impacts on community of the pandemic including an exploration of social isolation for older adults and on education in a Guatemalan community.

A case study presents lessons learned about locally focused development from Burlington, Vermont where “local” seems embedded in the DNA of this community. The article section is followed by a special section on Covid-19 and Local Development commentaries. We initiated a call for commentaries soon after the journal started and present the first six in this inaugural issue.

Commentaries are relatively short to moderate length reflections across a variety of topics. From exploring the role of community developers to issues of planning, the commentaries provide timely insights into thoughts and reactions to Covid-19 at the local level. There are other commentaries available online at the website as well. Connecting around this pandemic that knows no boundaries can be helpful by sharing reflections; we hope this will help in to alleviate isolation and other negative aspects of this uncertain time.

And now for a bit of background about what prompted the launch of this journal – even though we know that small-scale, locally owned or controlled businesses help create more prosperous, sustainable, connected communities (Goetz and Fleming, 2011; Mitchell, 2016; Phillips, Seifer, & Antczak, 2013; Shuman, 2015), there are not yet enough findings or scholarship to support efforts. We hope to change this by bringing together perspectives and research from scholars and practitioners alike that will help in efforts to better understand locally focused economies and societies across the full range of potentiality and impacts.

Movements such as the “local first” efforts in US communities, to the small change ideas of the UK, to self-controlled enterprises in the developing world hold potential to foster positive change at the collective, local level. Community-owned businesses and those that are attuned to local needs and conditions with socially responsible enterprises have impacts and benefits that often go beyond the immediately apparent economic ones, with culture and society being influenced as well. In some instances, such as places that have, and continue to, lose population must rely more and more on local investment through vehicles such as community-supported enterprises used in many countries to provide local goods and services as well as to support public services such as in Italy and Canada (Walzer, 2021).

We see it in the renewed interest in local food systems in which residents are gaining more control over their food supplies while supporting job and enterprise development in their own area to produce, process, and distribute (Bowen, 2015; Phillips & Wharton, 2016). This in turn can influence health and community well-being at the local level (Elias & Moore, 2017), another area of rising interest, especially with the difficult terrain we are navigating now with the pandemic while considering racial injustices and structural barriers for all to achieve quality of life and well-being outcomes.

Given the current situations and need to strengthen local economies, cultures, and societies, we believe this is an opportune good time to bring this new journal into production. We sincerely hope you will participate with us in this exciting new venture to bring more attention and scholarship to the issues and opportunities confronting local neighborhoods, communities, towns, and cities. Viable solutions and insights are needed now more than ever. Be well and we look forward to hearing from you as we move forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.