Gerry Delaney, a South African LED consultant, explains the main features of the Business Retention and Expansion (BR&E) approach to LED.

In this episode, Jörg Meyer-Stamer and Colin Mitchell continue their conversation on how to prepare a workshop. What are the issues that you consider when you design the sequence of activities in a given workshop? How do you make sure that the limited time is used effectively, and what do you do to get a practical result out of a workshop?

In this episode, Jörg Meyer-Stamer and Colin Mitchell discuss one of the critical issues in the organisation of a workshop: How do you invite the right people? And how do you handle the management of expectations properly?

In this episode, we present a conversation that was recorded at mesopartner's Summer Academy on Local Economic Development. Jim Tanburn shares his views on the topic of "local enabling environment" -- what it is, and what can be done to promote it. Jim is an international consultant who specialises in private sector development. He also administrates the Donor Committee's website, www.businessenvironment.org.

From now on, we will run parallel series on concepts, tools, cases, and specific issues. This is the first episode under 'concepts'. It addresses the topic of 'clusters' -- what are they, and why are they such in an issue in the context of local economic development?

With this episode we complete the first dozen. We take this as an occasion to reflect on our learning process, and to discuss some of the comments that we received from listeners.

Ulrich Harmes-Liedtke, mesopartner, interviews Martin Gasser of the ILO's International Training Center about the ILO's approach to LED.

The three meanings of facilitation in LED are facilitating a learning experience, a workshop or meeting, and an LED process. We discuss what often goes wrong in facilitation, and what to do about it.

We discuss why LED needs to be conceptualised as a process. It is crucial to build credibility, trust, confidence and creativity. An LED process is a learning process. It is also, unfortunately for external donors, somewhat unpredictable.

Christian Schoen interviews Jonathan Mitchell about the relationship between the pro-poor tourism approach and local economic development.