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This paper aims to present the case of a semester-long study-abroad education class in Italy. This course explored place-based methods that classroom teachers (K-12) might use to connect students’ outdoor surroundings to extend the lessons they learn in school about environmental sustainability. The experience of the university instructor and students outlined in this paper highlights the promise of place-based education to provide a potent approach for conveying principles of education for sustainable development (ESD).

An American university course enacted the approaches of place-based education and learning outdoors (harnessing student curiosity, building community partnerships, etc.) to investigate the natural and civic systems at work in the city of Florence. The participants deepened their understanding about the natural environment, economic health and well-being of inhabitants and compared the findings about local sustainable resource management to international settings. Through a deliberate practice framework, the students designed classroom lessons.

This discussion of university students’ work in an education course illuminates the possibilities for place-based applications in elementary and secondary schools. The pedagogical principles applied in this course also highlight the multidisciplinary strengths of ESD.

This paper provides an inside look at choices educators must make to provide relevance in classrooms, to connect the curriculum content that is standardized by governments with the systemic dilemmas that challenge communities. The author details the pedestrian topics that the university students examined during the semester. These lessons show that place-based inquiry situated in the outdoors can present clear lessons about sustainable development. An international comparative perspective can enhance learners’ perspectives about local surroundings.

Despite widespread recognition of the importance of place in entrepreneurship research, much less attention has been paid to the methodological challenges that inquiries into place presents. Understanding the relationship between place and entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important as focus turns to sustainable entrepreneurship and as policy makers turn to ‘place-based’ approaches to regional sustainability challenges. This chapter provides insight one researcher’s experiences engaging stakeholders in discussions about the relationship between a place-based university programme for sustainability and local sustainability agendas. The chapter reveals the struggles experienced by both researcher and participants in articulating what places and the local region means to both individuals and to the programme. The findings provide an important insight into how researchers studying place need to be cognisant of the limitations and flexibility of language when engaging research participants in discussing the relationship between place, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

Research shows that crime and disorder tend to concentrate in small, geographic locations and that place-based and problem-solving policing strategies can impact crime and disorder without displacing it to neighboring areas. However, implementation of problem-solving is a challenge. Loosely defined locations, shallow problem analysis, and distractions to problem-solving are cited implementation shortcomings. These shortcomings may be overcome by using the Case of Place approach, a case management strategy focused on documenting and analyzing place-based dynamics and characteristics to inform and direct policing strategies. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current study describes the adoption of the Case of Place approach in an urban police agency’s operations and performance management system. The authors utilize implementation theory to explore and explain the adoption of this new place-based strategy.

Key findings reveal important structural and cultural challenges to implementation. Structural challenges included modifying supervision structures, creating new positions, decentralizing analytical functions, and redirecting resources to problem-solving. Cultural challenges observed included emphasizing problem-solving as an organizational priority, integrating crime analysts into neighborhood precincts, and centering performance management processes around problem-solving.

The authors explore how implementation dynamics impact the adoption of new policies and practices, and offer a number of propositions for the use of the Case of Place approach within a place-based strategy portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to present alternative ways of addressing inequality in age-friendly work by drawing attention to the limitations of place-based approaches in meeting the needs of dispersed communities.

A case study of the age-friendly programme Ambition for Ageing (AfA) is used to explore three examples of working with minority communities.

Place-based age-friendly development risks further marginalising older people belonging to dispersed communities of identity or experience; therefore, we need to adopt adopt an intersectional approach to inequality in later life.

Three ways that age-friendly programmes may become more inclusive of minority groups who are geographically dispersed are identified: bringing community members together; co-production; and supporting visibility in mainstream settings.

This paper brings together insights from the AfA programme, critically assessing place-based approaches in relation to working with dispersed communities of identity. It offers some ways to mitigate limitations through adopting tailored equality approaches.

This purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze the concept of place-based business models, by which entrepreneurs use highly context-specific strategies and linkages to a “sense of place” as sources of value creation. To illustrate how place-based business models create unique value, case studies are reviewed from three sectors in Italy: Slow Food (Coop Italia and Eataly), agritourism (Spannocchia) and the albergo diffuso (Sextantio).

This is a conceptual paper with case studies from qualitative data and external sources.

The case studies demonstrate the value-creating potential of opportunities for the implementation of place-based business models. In contrast with conventional harm reduction perspectives, these models show how organizational contributions to local and regional resilience may also directly generate competitive advantage. The cases also illustrate challenges such as scaling up while maintaining authenticity, and coping with the public goods-nature of place-based resources.

Conventional management theory and practice treat environmental context as a distraction from which the technical core of the organization must be protected. Place-based business models diverge from convention by using tight coupling with local context to create value, enhance local economic resilience and contribute to a “sense of place”.

The study aims to identify the evoked “sense of place” that the campus community attributes to a watershed area in a Malaysian higher institution, aiming to enhance their participation in watershed conservation. Central to this objective is the incorporation of the concept of a watershed as a place, serving as the conceptual framework for analysis.

This case study explores an urban lake at Universiti Malaya, Malaysia’s oldest higher institution. It uses diverse qualitative data, including document analysis, semi-structured interviews, vox-pop interviews and a co-production workshop, to generate place-based narratives reflecting the meanings and values that staff and students associate with the watershed. Thematic analysis is then applied for further examination.

The data patterns reveal shared sense of place responses on: campus as a historic place, student, staff and campus identity, in-place learning experiences and interweaving of community well-being and watershed health. Recommendations advocate translating these narratives into campus sustainability communication through empirical findings and continuous co-production of knowledge and strategies with the campus community.

The research findings play a critical role in influencing sustainable campus planning and community inclusion by integrating place-based frameworks into sustainable development and watershed management. The study recommends the process of identifying place-based narratives with implications for the development of sustainability communication in a campus environment.

This paper contributes both conceptually and empirically to the sustainable management of a campus watershed area through place-based thinking. It outlines a process for enhancing campus sustainability communication strategies.

This qualitative case study provides a detailed description of the ways a Kindergarten/Grade 1 teacher in a Gulf Islands school, located on Canada’s west coast, integrated place-based education in her practice with young learners. The teacher’s integration of place-based knowledge over a school year, and her incorporation of traditional knowledge linked to local Coast Salish ways of knowing, was in response to the British Columbia Ministry of Education’s mandate to include local Indigenous ways of knowing in all classrooms. This study also reveals the ways an Indigenous educator affiliated with the school district and local community members provided the teacher and students with deeper understandings of Salt Spring Island from a historical, place-based, and Indigenous knowledge perspective. Specifically, the Indigenous educator and community members shared their knowledge on the vegetation on the island and shared information about the animals that lived on or near the island. Throughout the study, the teacher drew on a “critical pedagogy of place,” which focuses on the ecological aspects of place and the tenets of critical pedagogy. This study documented the ways the teacher included local Indigenous knowledge in her practice in culturally relevant and appropriate ways – primarily through outdoor learning experiences. The children also shared their perspectives on these learning experiences. In this study, the place-based learning opportunities provided to the children enabled them to acquire rich insight on the history and ecology of their community and island.

The neo-endogenous approach to rural development puts great importance on territorialization, and aligns with place-based strategies and with microentrepreneurship because both concepts consider local specificities and leveraging local resources. This chapter analyzes characteristics of rural tourism establishments in Vojvodina, Northern Province of Serbia, of which the majority are microenterprises. The discussion focuses on aspects of microenterprise functioning such as human capital, offers, revenues, and non-material benefits. The aim is to analyze the local embeddedness of rural tourism microenterprises and their contribution to neo-endogenous rural development. Our results reveal that microentrepreneurs are embedded in rural places, but they face numerous constraints which in turn limits the benefits host communities might receive from place-based rural tourism development.

Culture is increasingly recognized as a key component of local development, but this attention is largely focused on large cities. This paper aims to focus on the ways in which the innovative, participatory action-research (PAR) methods of IdeaLabs and community intervention workshops are used by two projects with solidarity economy enterprise (SEE) participants to activate place-based cultural resources for local development in small communities.

An in-depth reflexive analysis undertaken by researchers involved in the two projects, taking a feminist ethics of care perspective, demonstrates the ways in which these two PAR methods promote local development with the goal of fighting against the economic, social and cultural degradation of small cities and rural areas.

The PAR methods used by the two projects examined stimulate place-based local development initiatives through collaboration and knowledge co-production among participants and researchers. The projects go beyond an instrumental view of the use of culture and the arts for local development to innovate and demonstrate new methodologies for more participatory approaches.

This paper addresses a gap in social economy literature, presenting methods that can be used in PAR projects to catalyse the use of culture as a local development tool by local SEEs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between collaborative governance arrangements for place-based competitiveness and public innovation.

The paper combines a conceptual discussion of the links between collaborative governance, competitiveness policy and public innovation with a case study analysis of a specific governance process that aims at adapting policy to respond to local competitiveness challenges in the Basque province of Biscay.

The conceptual discussion leads to the hypothesis of a new distinction with respect to how governance relates to public innovation. Innovation can occur in governance, through governance or with governance. The analysis of the case supports this distinction. Multi-actor collaboration for competitiveness policymaking (innovation in governance) has led to policy innovation (innovation through governance). This has also promoted emerging administrative changes that could be conducive to a more innovative public sector in general (innovation with governance). These findings validate arguments posed by proponents of collaborative innovation that suggest that multi-actor collaboration is a driver for public sector innovation.

The value of the paper rests on linking theoretically and empirically two relevant and currently popular phenomena: networked governance for place-based competitiveness policymaking and public sector innovation. The paper provides original insights from the practice of building a process for context-sensitive policymaking that can inspire practitioners with similar problems.