Dilemmas, limitations and challenges of place leadership: instability and transitional dynamics in post-Brexit Northern Ireland

This paper considers place leadership in subnational settings characterised by complex post-conflict legacies that are engendering volatility and stasis. Using Northern Ireland as an illustrative case, we identify leadership dilemmas through the experience of a region where those in leadership roles are struggling to navigate problematic community and policy legacies. While the idea of place leadership offers much conceptual promise as a means of overcoming instability, there are many critical tensions ‘on the ground’ in Northern Ireland that render place leadership approaches risky to enact and vulnerable to a combination of opposing forces and ongoing post-Brexit policy turbulence.