‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’: Enhancing innovative practice in regeneration management

Explicit in the approach to regeneration policies in the UK in the past ten years has been the language of learning. Early reports, including ‘The learning curve’, for example, emphasised the value of innovation, the exchange of ideas and of the explicit transference of learning from one context to another. This paper presents the experiences of the authors over this ten-year period. In particular, it reflects upon understandings of innovation and of learning, and how it might best be fostered. The paper discusses examples in which learning was difficult to promote in cultures where the emphasis was not on learning from others, but on the redistribution of power to new groups of stakeholders. While this may have brought innovation, it did not always bring achievement or results. The paper concludes by trying to learn from this failure to learn. What is it about regeneration practice in the last ten years that makes it so difficult to identify, build and reinforce innovative practice? It is argued that policy has been developed without due regard being given to the complexities of implementation at a local level. In particular, insufficient regard was given to the skills practitioners needed to negotiate local politics, history and the paternalistic and, at times, overbearing interests of public agencies.