Next month marks the third anniversary of the CHIPS and Science Act, a significant legislative effort aimed at revitalizing the nation’s semiconductor production and emerging technologies. Driven by rapid technological advancements and increasing global competition, the act was part of a broader industrial strategy initiated by the Biden-Harris administration and the 117th Congress. While federal legislation and regulations initiated this strategy, its success now depends on regional and state-level execution and private sector involvement.
Last month, we witnessed the regional impact of this initiative during a gathering of business, civic, and government leaders in Syracuse, New York, where Micron Technology is investing $100 billion in a new semiconductor facility, supported by incentives from the CHIPS and Science Act. This event concluded two years of collaborative learning and experimentation among economic leaders in seven regions—Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; Minneapolis-Saint Paul; Pittsburgh; Syracuse; and Tulsa, Oklahoma—to convert federal investments into inclusive, long-term regional economic transformation.
The key takeaway from the Syracuse meeting and across these regions is that combining federal policy experimentation with local civic innovation has led to a more ambitious form of economy-building. Unlike traditional economic development, this approach focuses on regional economic transformation—shifting regions toward higher-value industries and better jobs, boosting productivity, and helping more people move up the economic ladder.
This article explains why this new model of regional economic strategy and leadership is crucial now, amid disruptive economic changes, national political uncertainty, and declining trust in institutions. We then explore the six shifts needed to implement regional economic transformation strategies, drawing on examples from Syracuse and other locations across the country. We conclude by outlining the sustained support required from government, philanthropy, and industry for this model to operate at a scale that can secure the nation’s economic future and ensure more communities benefit.
A moment of federal change and decentralized economic leadership
Despite recent economic growth, many Americans are still struggling financially, and public confidence in national leadership is limited and highly partisan—pressuring local, regional, and state leaders to deliver solutions that improve living standards and rebuild trust. Recent polling shows that in April 2025, Americans identified the economy (39%) and poor leadership (28%) as the nation’s two most pressing problems, reflecting dissatisfaction with rising costs, insufficient wages, and eroding trust in public institutions.
The basic economic challenge in most regions is that wages remain too low to cover rapidly increasing living costs. Figure 1 shows the share of “thriving families” in each U.S. metropolitan area; “thriving” is defined as earning enough to cover the basic costs of housing, child care, transportation, and energy. The share of thriving families varies significantly across the U.S., from less than 50% in parts of California and Florida to over 70% in parts of the Midwest.
To enhance economic mobility for more workers and families, regional leaders must pursue a dual mandate: grow good jobs and maintain an affordable cost of living.
To grow good jobs, every region relies on a set of export-intensive advanced industries, such as advanced manufacturing, technology services, and energy. These industries are 50% more likely to generate good jobs than locally serving sectors, due to their reliance on technology and innovation. Importantly, advanced industry jobs are accessible to workers without a four-year degree, creating real opportunities for upward mobility. Altogether, advanced industry supply chains and their indirect impacts support 39 million jobs nationwide, enhancing ownership opportunities and employment in both suppliers and Main Street businesses. However, these high-value industries that disproportionately generate good jobs are not evenly distributed across regional economies, which have been diverging for decades.
Even places where the innovation economy has grown have struggled to translate that growth into broad gains in living standards. Constrained housing supply has eroded affordability, limiting the real wage gains that working and middle-class residents saw from tech booms. Put simply, there are too few economically vibrant parts of the United States that remain affordable enough to boost living standards for everyone. According to recent Brookings research, of the nation’s 195 largest metro areas, only 10 achieved strong growth between 2013 and 2023 without also experiencing sharply rising costs of living. While these 10 metro areas are quite different from one another (the group includes Des Moines, Iowa and Fargo, North Dakota, but also Fort Collins, Colorado, and Santa Rosa, California), all have expanded their housing supply since 2013 at a pace that exceeds population growth, easing pressure on workers and housing markets.
In response to these challenges, federal lawmakers in Washington have alternated between two very different economic paradigms over the past decade. In the post-pandemic period, Congress and the Biden-Harris administration dramatically expanded federal investments to support short-term local economic recovery, while working to rebuild the economy in the longer term through major investments in infrastructure, clean energy, semiconductors, and other strategic sectors. To ensure these investments reached all corners of the country, the federal government deployed an estimated $40 billion in place-based policies that intentionally directed investments toward regions that were left behind by deindustrialization and more recent technological innovation.
Since 2022, these public investments helped incentivize over $750 billion in private investment positioned to flow disproportionately to economically distressed places. Yet the measurable economic impacts of this reinvestment are only beginning to materialize, as it can take years for new production facilities and supportive infrastructure to yield job and wage benefits. And accompanying these major investments was persistently high inflation that frustrated voters ahead of the 2024 election.
The responsibility for much economic leadership is shifting downward—suddenly and significantly—to local, regional, and state actors. These actors now face a clear mandate: stabilize their communities amid federal retrenchment while also laying the groundwork for long-term competitiveness, resilience, and shared prosperity.
Since taking office, the Trump-Vance administration has also been focused on reindustrializing the U.S. economy, but has taken a meaningfully different approach: tariffs, a geopolitical reset, and aggressive foreign direct investment attraction. Broader policy changes include aggressive immigration restrictions, deregulation, and deep cuts to health, education, housing assistance, infrastructure, R&D spending, and federal staff capacity. Risks and vulnerabilities for local governments, higher education, industry, and civic organizations have grown, and so has uncertainty, as many executive actions are challenged in the courts and congressional battles over taxes and budgets persist. Consumer sentiment is declining, with expectations down 32% since January 2025. Public frustration with government leadership has risen sharply, with 28% of Americans now citing it as the nation’s most pressing problem, up from 17% in October 2024.
Rarely has the United States experienced such a dramatic shift from federal expansionism to austerity and protectionism. As a result, the responsibility for much economic leadership is shifting downward—suddenly and significantly—to local, regional, and state actors. These actors now face a clear mandate: stabilize their communities amid federal retrenchment while also laying the groundwork for long-term competitiveness, resilience, and shared prosperity. This mandate also requires regional leaders to confront the technological, demographic, and environmental forces that, over time, most profoundly shape a region’s economic future.
The good news is that many regions are starting from a position of strength. Across the country, a diverse network of leaders, organizations, and coalitions—shaped by the disruptions of the pandemic and energized by recent waves of federal investment—are working to build a more inclusive, resilient economy from the bottom up through regional economic transformation. This is very different from conventional local economic development, and it addresses economic opportunities and costs in ways that go beyond traditional social policy as well. In practical ways, it targets economic growth that is more sustainable and broadly supported because it is inclusive and widely shared.
Central New York’s approach to regional economic transformation
The Syracuse metro area and broader Central New York region provide an illustrative case study. The region’s economic history mirrors that of many older industrial cities: Once a thriving manufacturing hub thanks to its location along the Erie Canal and a postwar specialization in radar technology led by General Electric, the city experienced a sharp decline beginning in the 1970s. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Syracuse metro area ranked near the bottom among large U.S. metro areas for job growth and poverty reduction. And by 2020, Syracuse had lost nearly 80,000 residents from its 1950 peak of 220,000.
Yet Syracuse is now a site of reinvention. Decades of sustained focus, co-investment, and collaborative alignment have synergized with the nation’s reindustrialization wave of the past five years. Central New York is now a key proving ground, as Micron Technology—a global leader in chip manufacturing—is using more than $10 billion in state and federal incentives to support a $100 billion investment in new semiconductor fabrication facilities in the region. Federal and state funding are converging with regional leadership to spark new forms of industrial innovation and, with the right additional steps, reconnect long-marginalized communities to pathways for economic mobility. What follows are the building blocks for Central New York’s ongoing regional economic transformation:
Focus across institutions, levels of government, and strategic priorities enables a unified, long-term vision
In 2010, Central New York was reeling from the Great Recession as poverty rates spiked. That same year, the region merged two business membership organizations into a single entity: the CenterState Corporation for Economic Opportunity (CenterState CEO). The new organization’s leadership quickly recognized the region did not have the available local resources to execute a full-scale economic turnaround. So, to address local distress, they looked outward to understand how the region plugged into the global value chains that define the modern economy. Central New York leaders rigorously assessed the industries in which the region could offer unique value, created new economic plans that communicated these major opportunities, and structured new investments in talent, innovation, and infrastructure to seize them.
Over time, Central New York married its industrial competitiveness objectives with economic inclusion, arguing that the region could not compete globally if it was failing to invest in the talents of its entire population. CenterState CEO was the foundation for this consolidated approach. As Brookings Metro described in a 2022 report: “CenterState CEO plays all the traditional economic development functions that most chambers play (business attraction, business retention and expansion, advocacy, networking), but it also runs the region’s main incubator and accelerator, has a four-member workforce development team, and a growing racial equity team that provides diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consulting to businesses.”
A holistic vision for inclusive growth emerged, becoming the region’s North Star over the past decade and extending well beyond any one business cycle or term of office. Key business leaders have championed the approach: “If we fail to elevate our most economically fragile people, we’ll have lost a generation of talent, and companies with deep roots in this region are going to lose the workforce race,” noted Melanie Littlejohn, president and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation, a former energy executive, and chair of the CenterState CEO board. This shared vision prepared the region to consider the critical linkages needed to translate Micron’s major investment into real opportunity for a broad swath of workers, small businesses, and communities.
Importantly, the state of New York reinforced this regional vision. Since 2011, Empire State Development (ESD), the state’s main economic development agency, has also adopted a strategy focused on export industries, talent, innovation, placemaking, and inclusion. But it was the unique governance relationship between the state and Central New York that knitted these visions together: ESD established 10 regional councils to create a leadership table in Central New York that helped align local priorities with state funding streams. The region and state’s visions were not simply plans with similar language—they were operationalized in a governance model that linked state and regional priorities with recurrent funding opportunities. In parallel, ESD also outlined statewide strategic sector priorities, including a deep focus on the microelectronics industry.
Sustained public, private, and philanthropic co-investment enables robust ecosystem-building
Vision—particularly when it becomes an aligned and operationalized strategy—provides a foundation for success, but investment is what makes it real. Over the past decade, Central New York has gone through multiple strategic planning processes—each grounded in rigorous market research, industry engagement, and a clear-eyed understanding of the region’s unique assets—that have yielded significant investment in key industries. For example, a 2015 planning process led by CenterState CEO resulted in the region winning a $500 million investment from New York’s Upstate Revitalization Initiative to scale key levers of economic growth, including early investments in a workforce intermediary model and capital commitments to build new drone testing infrastructure. In 2018, the city of Syracuse, CenterState CEO, and other partners launched the Syracuse Surge, an inclusive innovation strategy that received $3 million in capacity-building funding from JPMorgan Chase and has since spurred over $100 million in related investments in education, infrastructure, and tech-driven entrepreneurship.
Meanwhile, New York state has been a crucial investment source, including in the semiconductor cluster. The state has invested billions in the Albany NanoTech Complex, a semiconductor research and development facility, as well as in business attraction incentives for new semiconductor projects, such as GlobalFoundries’ $4.2 billion chip fabrication plant near Albany in 2009 and Wolfspeed’s $1 billion facility in Utica (50 miles east of Syracuse) in 2019. The state has also invested in key semiconductor suppliers; for example, providing $22 million in tax credits and workforce investments for the $320 million Edwards Vacuum dry pump manufacturing facility in upstate New York. These state-level investments gave New York technical credibility and institutional muscle in semiconductor recruitment long before Micron came calling.
The policy environment around semiconductor investment shifted dramatically upon the August 2022 passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which created a 25% tax credit and $52 billion federal package for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, R&D, and workforce development. Just two days later, New York passed its own Green CHIPS legislation, layering in additional state-level incentives tied to labor, sustainability, and local procurement. Within weeks, ESD and CenterState CEO were negotiating one of the largest private sector investments in U.S. history.
Crucially, state and regional partners didn’t treat Micron’s arrival as a standalone win. Instead, they framed it as the anchor for a future semiconductor cluster—a catalytic investment that would require supportive infrastructure, talent pipelines, innovation capacity, and inclusive growth strategies. The resulting deal included $6.1 billion in federal support, $5.5 billion in state incentives, and a $250 million commitment from Micron toward a new $500 million Community Investment Fund (CIF).
Regional leaders have since begun deploying ecosystem-building investments, including: an $80 million state workforce investment through the state’s $200 million One Network for Regional Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships (ON-RAMP) program; a $40 million Economic Development Administration Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) grant in partnership with Buffalo and Rochester; and $65 million in CHIPS and Science Act workforce development funding from the U.S. Commerce Department. Equally important have been investments in housing, energy, and transportation infrastructure to prepare the region for expansion.
Broad, collaborative alignment enables the region to act as one team and deliver outcomes at scale
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Central New York’s success is the scale and diversity of its regional coalition. From the beginning, the region recognized that for the Micron investment to generate lasting prosperity, it would need to serve the broader community. The result is a notable example of economic development through broad resident engagement and multi-institutional collaboration.
To be sure, the region is still striving to organize at the scale of its challenges. But over the past decade, several organizations have built the civic muscle and relationships that enable complex and adaptive collaboration. Initiatives such as the Upstate Revitalization Initiative and Syracuse Surge provided practice in coalition-building—bringing together local governments, economic development agencies, higher education institutions, community-based organizations, and philanthropic partners. By the time Micron arrived, the region had established a foundation for multi-organizational collaboration, all grounded in a shared commitment to inclusive growth.
Thus, to ensure that the use of the CIF reflected community needs, the region appointed leaders from the Central New York Community Foundation and the SUNY Syracuse Educational Opportunity Center to co-chair a Community Engagement Committee that solicited input from more than 13,000 residents.
Community Engagement Committee members
Industry and business: Micron
Philanthropy: Central New York Community Foundation; Allyn Family Foundation; Gifford Foundation
Government: Empire State Development; Onondaga County; city of Syracuse; town of Clay; Governor’s Office of Semiconductor Expansion, Management, and Integration (GO-SEMI)
Higher education: SUNY Syracuse Educational Opportunity Center; SUNY Oswego
Nonprofit and community: Food Bank of Central New York; New Life Temple of Praise; Home HeadQuarters
Anchor institutions: Syracuse Community Health; Veterans Affairs Syracuse
CenterState CEO provides staffing support to the committee.
The result is the Community Priorities Document, a living strategy for translating Micron’s investment into community benefit through intentional investments in: 1) educational resources and access; 2) minority-, women-, and veteran-owned businesses; 3) workforce exposure, development, and job opportunities; 4) housing, community development, and quality of place; and 5) community health and family supports. A broad coalition of public, private, and nonprofit actors is leading implementation, each playing a defined role in housing, workforce, infrastructure, or innovation. CenterState CEO has provided critical staffing support for the effort, with the help of a consulting team. But the goal is to broadly extend ownership—the region is executing through distributed leadership, but within a shared strategic framework.
Orchestrating this civic process—community engagement, strategic prioritization, investment acquisition, and organizational alignment—has required even greater capacity at organizations such as CenterState CEO and ESD, as well as key partners such as the Central New York Community Foundation. That capacity has been provided and supported through strategic infusions of philanthropic capital (from the Ford Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions), as well as overtime work from leaders at these regional organizations. Together, leaders from these organizations are the “connective tissue” that helps build and sustain the broader coalition.
It will be some time before we know whether Central New York’s sustained focus, transformative co-investment, and collaborative alignment will deliver as promised. But the early wins described above are emblematic of a new form of regional economic development—and more precisely, regional economic transformation—that offers the nation a model for the innovation economy as a whole. It’s a model that uses catalytic public funding to unlock private capital and deploy it to generate growth (good jobs, small business opportunities, and more), while also preserving affordable costs of living through simultaneous, coordinated investments in people and neighborhoods.
Six shifts regions are making to pursue regional economic transformation
Given the scale of private and public investment in Central New York, it is a particularly noteworthy example of the shift underway in regional economic development. But Central New York is far from alone: Across the country, other regions are beginning to marshal similarly high levels of focus, investment, and alignment. In some regions, the shift from “traditional” to “transformational” economic development approaches has been occurring over many years. In others, recent federal grants have catalyzed the shift.
Altogether, the shift is still emergent, and realizing its full promise will require sustained investment and measurable wins, especially in expanding meaningful access to opportunity for underrepresented workers and entrepreneurs. As recent Brookings Metro research has shown, the philanthropic sector can play a unique and vital role in catalyzing and sustaining this shift toward regional economic transformation.
Shift in focus
From jobs to inclusive growth
Too often, traditional economic development strategies direct scarce public and civic resources toward subsidizing low-wage job creation. Transformational approaches, by contrast, center inclusive growth as their guiding objective: growing high-quality jobs and wealth-building opportunities that enhance upward economic mobility, with a particular focus on developing high-opportunity advanced industries, not just attracting any and all employers.
Focusing on advanced industries dramatically increases the likelihood of generating quality jobs and building regional wealth. The average worker in advanced industries earns nearly double the average worker outside of them. Notably, the sector is also accessible to workers without four-year degrees: More than half of advanced industry workers possess less than a bachelor’s degree. Moreover, these industries generate and support “unusually extensive supply chains” that can sustain small businesses and boost local ownership, according to Brookings research that found that advanced industries, directly and indirectly, support almost 39 million jobs—nearly a quarter of the nation’s employment.
This shift requires sustained, intentional focus on inclusion. Without it, efforts to grow next-generation industries risk reinforcing the next generation of unequal access to opportunity instead. As an illustrative example, Central Ohio is poised to receive billions in new industrial investment. In preparation, the Columbus Partnership, through Ohio Excels, has joined with Columbus City Schools, Columbus State University, Ohio State University, and the state of Ohio on a $7 million JPMorgan Chase-backed initiative to expose high school students to high-value careers. The effort recently expanded to advanced manufacturing and construction—industries expected to grow with coming investments in semiconductors, batteries, and data centers. While several career on-ramp programs have emerged, a new $2 million grant from JPMorgan Chase will support the development of a “talent collaborative” to enable more systemic, coordinated workforce efforts that connect residents to the region’s industrial boom.
From marketing to market-shaping strategies
Regions do not transform by accident. They do so when local leaders align around a bold, strategic bet on an industry of the future—and commit to growing it with focus, capital, and coordination. Only then can regions move from small-scale, project-based interventions to broader efforts that reshape a region’s economic trajectory by concentrating attention, resources, and partnerships in next-generation industries in which a region has a credible shot to be strong and competitive, with intensive effort.
Illinois offers a case in point. In 2023, Governor JB Pritzker charged leaders from the state’s universities and business communities with creating Innovate Illinois—a state- and philanthropy-funded statewide initiative focused on securing federal resources to grow Illinois’ most promising industries. Since its launch, Innovate Illinois has helped the state secure two Tech Hubs designations from the federal government, including a $51 million award to boost precision fermentation and biomanufacturing in Central Illinois; a Recompete Pilot Program finalist award for job revitalization in Decatur; and a National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engines award of up to $160 million over 10 years to advance clean water technologies to support water-intensive industries. It has also been instrumental in launching a $500 million state investment in quantum technology that complements the federally backed Bloch Quantum Tech Hub.
Looking ahead, Innovate Illinois’ priorities have evolved to focus on three “big bets”: quantum computing, clean energy, and, at the heart of both, growth for all. In quantum computing, for instance, this vision is being operationalized through the development of a quantum campus on Chicago’s South Side, anchored by PsiQuantum’s new manufacturing facility, with the potential to generate thousands of jobs. Realizing the full potential of these investments, however, will depend on building broader, more diverse coalitions that can translate economic opportunity into lasting, inclusive prosperity, especially for South Side residents.
From top-down to coalitional
Moving from individual projects to market-shaping strategies requires regions to concentrate attention, align funding, and stay committed across terms of office, leadership transitions, and economic disruptions. That kind of sustained effort is only possible when there is trust in the process, the partners involved, and the fairness of how benefits will be distributed. Achieving this requires an evolution from closed, top-down decisionmaking structures toward inclusive, coalition-based strategies that earn buy-in from both industry and community stakeholders.
Few organizations exemplify this shift better than GREATER MSP, the economic partnership for the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro region. Originally focused on business attraction and regional branding, GREATER MSP has grown into a platform for large-scale, cross-sector collaboration. It has launched more than half a dozen major strategic initiatives involving over 1,000 leaders, from CEOs and entrepreneurs to elected officials and grassroots organizers. One flagship example is the MedTech 3.0 coalition, which brings together over 250 leaders from more than 40 organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. With a new Tech Hubs designation for medical technology, the region is now using federal planning support to build a next-generation talent partnership for the medical technology and semiconductor sectors. This includes co-designing new pathways into in-demand jobs with leaders from higher education, workforce systems, community groups, employers, and the state.
Shift in investment
From fragmented funding to co-investment
Regional economic transformation does not occur quickly, and it requires both a range of funding types and time horizons as well as coordination among them. In short, no single institution can or should fund and finance transformation alone. As such, regions need to shift from a funding environment characterized by programmatic siloes, relatively short-term project grants, and too little capacity-building, to one that can achieve sustained performance through creative funding and financing, risk sharing, and burden sharing—true co-investment.
This is where many regional strategies stall. Ambitious ideas are drafted and partners get excited, but strategies cannot get resourced because the initial financial risks are too great, available money is not fit-for-purpose, or the burden is too unevenly distributed. Successful regions build shared investment that draws from local, state, federal, private, and philanthropic sources. This means developing risk-tolerant capital, including flexible grants, to finance early-stage efforts and grow the pipeline of investable projects and enterprises—from affordable housing capital to revenue-based supplier finance—required by impact and commercial investors. It means co-creating burden-sharing agreements that outline roles, responsibilities, and social and financial return expectations across dozens of partners. And it means building the sustainable financing infrastructure—intermediaries, program service fees, revolving funds, etc.—that gives coalitions staying power.
The Southwestern Pennsylvania New Economy Collaborative (NEC) illustrates this shared investment model. With leadership from the Allegheny Conference and Carnegie Mellon University, NEC received a $63 million Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant to translate the promise of Pittsburgh’s world-class artificial intelligence and robotics research assets into inclusive growth across an 11-county region traditionally dependent on coal mining and agriculture. Federal grant funds were allocated across five projects designed to de-risk robotics and technology adoption in the marketplace; advance talent development and up-skilling; and promote innovation and commercialization to spur economic growth. To secure the grant, NEC received $20 million in matched philanthropic investment, which required it to align each philanthropy’s goals to the goals of the robotics strategy. As of 2024, NEC had reached over 5,000 students and served over 1,000 small and midsized businesses. To sustain the strategy, the Allegheny Conference is pursuing new sources of commercial capital and state funding that will ensure NEC’s early benefits extend well beyond the five-year grant period.
Shift in alignment
From siloed programs to aligned teams
Economic transformation requires civic scale—scale achieved through an uncommonly broad alliance of partners who can both grow a next-generation industry and connect residents to the opportunities it creates. To do this, regions need a platform that allows many organizations to come together as one integrated team in service of a shared strategy. Those teams must understand market dynamics enough to engage and activate industry as a foundation for economic growth, while also leveraging the missions and capabilities of government and nonprofit organizations more motivated by place-based progress than profit. Building and maintaining these teams requires a dedicated entity to design strategies, align investments, track progress, and help partners deliver the strategy over time. Traditional terms such as “convener” or “intermediary” do not adequately capture the level of active facilitation, trust-building, strategy development, and civic orchestration required.
As an example, Central Indiana’s Heartland BioWorks (HBW) strategy seeks to grow the region’s biomanufacturing cluster through a highly aligned strategy and delivery team. Using a $51 million Tech Hubs grant, HBW aims to train and graduate over 1,000 Hoosiers for careers in biomanufacturing. But this requires aligning the workforce board, community college, universities, and employers to catalyze awareness, conduct outreach, design stackable credentials, execute training, conduct placement, and measure whether participants obtained quality jobs. Entities such as BioCrossroads (a branded initiative of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership) and the Applied Research Institute provide the “connective tissue” that brings these organizations together around a shared strategy.
The lesson is clear, if unsurprising: No single organization, program, or investment can transform a regional economy. The only way to build a future-ready economy that delivers for everyone is through diverse and broad coalitions that are aligned, accountable, and ready to execute at scale.
From performance measurement to performance management
Trust is the intangible, invisible secret sauce behind economic transformation. It’s what allows coalitions to hold together, empowers leaders to act with legitimacy and support, and keeps communities engaged through uncertainty, disagreements, and headwinds. But with public trust in institutions at historic lows, it cannot be assumed. Trust must be built—and rebuilt—through consistent performance and civic transparency. That’s one reason why regions must develop the capacity to move from performance measurement (tracking outputs) to performance management (using data to adapt strategies in real time). Performance management also enhances transparency; it compels leaders to clarify goals, openly report progress, and acknowledge what isn’t working. In doing so, it becomes a source of insight, accountability, and legitimacy, while also reducing surprises and strengthening alignment among coalition partners, funders, and governments (for many of the same reasons it is also core to the “collective impact” approach to change).
Trust is the intangible, invisible secret sauce behind economic transformation. It’s what allows coalitions to hold together, empowers leaders to act with legitimacy and support, and keeps communities engaged through uncertainty, disagreements, and headwinds.