Mainstream local development policy in the 1980s is moving towards practices that are undemocratic and rest on an inadequate theoretical base. The increasingly popular concept of a public-private partnership is institutionalizing corporate domination over local government policy. This corporate domination is reflected in local policy trends towards reduced government regulation of business, antiunion practices, and efforts to transform the urban environment to meet the needs of corporate accumulation. These problems are compounded by the inadequate theoretical basis of mainstream policies, which are based on neoclassical theories of location and comparative advantage and on a revival of uneven development and growth pole theories of the 1 950s and 1960s. These theories, and the policies they inform, are ill-suited to deal with the new forms of spatial and internal organization being adopted by corporations in response to a new international division of labor. These deficiencies in theory and policy suggest that there are areas where leftist or alternative policies that promote a more democratically controlled local economy might be applied.
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