The Connecting Localism and Community Empowerment project sought to assess the merits of the assumption that localisms brings about community empowerment through a review of the existing academic and policy literatures. The key findings from the review point towards a lack of clarity and coherence in the literature in the usage and interpretations of the terms ‗localism‘ and ‗community empowerment‘. They are often defined by implication or tacitly assumed to have an accepted definition. Whilst greater localism is generally claimed to increase community empowerment, there are substantive grounds for questioning this claim, which arise from critically analysing these concepts and how they interact. These grounds highlight conditions which need to be fulfilled if localism is to realise its potential to enhance community empowerment. To understand these conditions we analysed four international case studies. We also consider two assessments of the New Labour government‘s localist policies in the UK
