POLICY PAPER Building Collaboration for Local Economic Development in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland’s economic development landscape features a multiplicity of institutions that have historically operated in relative isolation. The costs of this fragmentation include duplicated provision, misaligned strategies, incoherent business support, and missed synergies. While the establishment of Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs) offers one structural response, the greater opportunity lies in integrating parallel initiatives into a coherent, mutually reinforcing whole.

Drawing on institutional collective action (ICA) theory, network and social capital research, and comparative evidence from English LEPs, Scottish regional partnerships, and Northern Ireland’s own LEADER experience, this paper argues that purposeful collaboration is not a natural condition but an achievement requiring deliberate investment. It identifies five strategic objectives:

Shared strategic frameworks that establish an overarching logic of economic change;


Building collaborative capacity through leadership development, secondments, and communities of practice;

Joint delivery mechanisms including innovation clusters, co-designed skills pipelines, and integrated business support;

Knowledge and intelligence sharing via a common data infrastructure and developmental evaluation; and

Building resilience and adaptability to survive political change and leadership transitions.

The paper addresses Northern Ireland’s distinctive context: small scale enabling personal trust but also systemic relationship risks; consociational political complexity; all-island economic integration; and a mature social enterprise sector concentrated in deprived communities. Critical success factors include sustained political commitment, adequate resourcing, senior leadership, appropriate phasing, attention to power dynamics, and policy alignment. A developmental evaluation framework, embedded from the outset and generating real-time learning rather than retrospective audit, is proposed. Realistic timeframes span early relationship-building (years 1-2), emergence of joint delivery (years 3-5), and consolidation of outcomes (years 5-7). The paper concludes that the greatest gains will come not from any single structural reform but from the integration of parallel efforts into a coherent whole.