After the Arab spring Revolutions: 7 reasons why LED offers a major solution to North Africa’s economic problems

The revolutions that deposed the longstanding regimes in Tunisia and Egypt offer a historic opportunity to put in place effective economic policy making structures, providing a model for other reforming countries. This short paper points out that traditional top down sectoral economic policies will not be sufficient to bring about the dramatic changes in economic de-velop-ment that people in these countries now expect of their new governments. People will no longer be content with approaches that only improve economic conditions for the popu-lation in general but want to see new policies specifically targeted at decreasing inequality and bettering the conditions of the poor. The paper argues that the LED approach offers these countries a way to solve some of the most important economic and local governance problems they face in the medium to long term. An innovative, bottom up approach, LED is designed to reduce inequalities between regions and promote pro-poor growth through unleashing the economic potentials of every territory. The approach empowers local stakeholders from the public, private and civil society sectors to work in partnership to identify the obstacles hindering their local economies and manage investments that remove those obstacles. Furthermore, the participatory nature of LED offers a strategic way in which the local public can be engaged in economic decision making for the first time.