[In]Sight Theme Paper – Institutional Foundations

The RAI has released its seventh [In]Sight Theme Paper titled Institutional Foundations, as part of a series of ten papers exploring Australia’s greatest competitive challenges.

The Theme Paper measures and ranks institutional foundations for regions and Local Government Areas (LGA) taking into consideration public sector workforce, leadership capacity, community based skills, volunteering, presence of major organisations, local economic development support, local government discretionary expenditure and the financial burden of local government.

Click here to review the summary and read the full report.

Key statistics include:

• 57 of the top 100 areas for institutional foundations are regional;
• The top 100 LGAs for volunteering are all regional;
• 25 regional LGAs have 50 percent or more of the workforce employed in a leadership capacity; and
• 29 regional LGAs have a score of zero for local economic development support.

Strong institutional foundations facilitate negotiation, dialogue and collaboration, enabling regions to exert influence with higher levels of government and other organisations required to advance regional development priorities and interests.

However, the research notes that more institutions are not always better; some places can be challenged by institutions that are too small or too few to facilitate growth, while others have a plethora of institutional factors that conflict or crowd each other, undermining collaboration required to deliver effective regional development outcomes.