Some of the most compelling explanations for the current crisis reasoning comes from a Marxist understanding of how rising inequality and accumulation by dispossession during the neoliberal era led to economic instability. Other arguments put forward tend to ignore the inappropriateness of stimulating aggregate demand in an era when we have already grown beyond the planetary boundary, as evidenced by the crises of land use, climate change, and resource depletion. It may not be possible to address these problems within a reformed capitalism; rather, such a goal can only be met within a post-capitalist ecological economy geared to production for need, not for profit. This paper sets out a post-capitalist alternative drawing from green economics and Marxian economics and applied at a local and regional level.

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This paper develops a model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into a private-sector dominated ?core? region and a public-sector dominated ?periphery?. A large public sector is closely associated with peripheral economies, although it is unclear to what extent it is a cause of peripherality rather than a symptom. The paper takes a minimum public sector size, dependent on each region's population, to present a public sector increasing in volume relative to falling population. This modelling activity is an attempt to quantify empirical and quantitative observations on the size of regional public sectors in terms of the new economic geography, and demonstrates that under various conditions a relatively large public sector can be beneficial for a peripheral region.Peer reviewe

This article describes how regional policy issues in North West Wales have been explored with local stakeholders, using scenario development to organise indigenous knowledge and elicit interpretations of the wider world. The context of scenario development, both in general and in its participatory form, is outlined, prior to an introduction to the study region and the policy framework which influences its development. In the latter part of the article, the process of construction and development of scenarios in combination with Delphi-like iterative questionnaires is described, showing how the gathering, organisation and interpretation of opinions, information and data from key stakeholders can illustrate a range of potential regional futures. The approach allows considerable broadening of stakeholder engagement at low cost. The four resulting scenario narratives and the policy insights they yield diverge considerably from top-down strategic planning perspectives and prescriptions. The article concludes by considering the general applicability of this guided method which draws on local knowledge of and involvement in policy decisions across different scales of impact, and provides more realistic and balanced perspectives, and demonstrates that enhanced quality and efficiency in decision making as well as opportunities for institutional learning can be achieved.