Durable Growth and Ethics: Equality of Opportunity, Transparency, and Community Benefits
Every development decision is a decision about trust. When a community offers land, tax relief, infrastructure, or its own reputation to attract investment, it spends something held in common, and it does so on behalf of residents who rarely sit at the table. Growth that reaches only a narrow slice of a county is not merely a question of fairness. It is a question of durability. A local economy that leaves talent idle, and neighbors unconvinced, is a fragile one. This post sets out the norms and practical tools by which development can be made both fair and trusted, and it offers an opportunity lens that we can apply to our own decisions in Grant County.
What Inclusive Growth Means
Inclusive growth has a workable definition. In its Metro Monitor, the Brookings Institution measures regional economies across three dimensions at once: growth, the size of the economy; prosperity, productivity and living standards; and inclusion, broad-based opportunity and a narrowing of economic disparity. A region achieves inclusive growth only when it advances all three together.
Marcelo M. Giugale, in Economic Development: What Everyone Needs to Know, frames the same challenge more sharply as the problem of “those who are always left behind.” His chapter on inclusion focuses on the groups that conventional growth statistics tend to overlook or undercount: women facing persistent barriers to full economic participation, low-income residents who often remain outside formal systems of identity and voice, informal workers whose livelihoods are real but unprotected, and children whose earliest years determine later productivity. The point is when large segments of a population are systematically sidelined, the economy forgoes talent, productivity, and legitimacy. For a county that competes on the strength of its workforce, unused capacity is a cost already being paid.
The evidence treats opportunity as an input to growth rather than a levy upon it. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have found that regions offering greater equality of opportunity to low-income residents tend to post higher aggregate growth, because they draw talent and productivity from a wider share of their population. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford have estimated that reducing barriers facing women and Black men accounts for roughly a fifth of the growth in American output per person since 1960. Giugale adds a complementary calculation from the developing world: if the average developing country could rid itself of gender discrimination, it would grow at least two percentage points faster every year, enough resources to expand social protection or education at scale. The direction of the finding is the same whether the setting is a U.S. metro or a national economy: leaving people behind is expensive.
Regional economic development organizations are not bystanders. Brookings’ work with development groups in Indianapolis, Nashville, and San Diego concluded that such organizations could expand equality of opportunity when they treat inclusion as strategy rather than slogan, and when they are candid about the limits of their current efforts. Candor of that kind is uncomfortable for organizations whose usual task is to sell a place. It is also the beginning of credibility.
Ethics is the operating system beneath these tools. The International Economic Development Council, the profession’s largest membership body, asks its members to practice with integrity and honesty, to hold the public trust in both fact and appearance, to keep themselves free of interests that would impair their judgment, and to maintain the confidences of the parties they work with. Two of those duties pull against each other in daily practice: the duty of confidence owed to a prospect, and the duty of candor owed to the public. Ethical practice does not resolve that tension by abandoning one side. It resolves it by knowing precisely where each duty governs, and for how long.
An Opportunity Lens for Development Decisions
An equity lens is a discipline of asking better questions before a decision is made rather than defending it afterward. The approach was refined by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity; its central insight is that durable change comes from altering which questions are asked when a policy or investment is designed. Which sites get priority, which incentives are more important now, which programs to launch, whom to hire, and with whom to contract? This approach is meant to be used in the room, briefly, and honestly. Giugale’s observation that some residents often “complain so little” because they sit outside formal systems of identity, representation, and voice underscores why the participation and accountability questions matter. If those left behind have no practical channel to be heard, silence can be mistaken for consent for any motion.
Decision and intended result. What decision is before us, and what outcome do we intend? Who is expected to benefit, in what way, and over what period?
Who is affected. Which residents, neighborhoods, and businesses stand to gain, and which bear the costs? Are they the same people? Consider geography across the county, from Marion and Gas City to Converse, Fairmount, and the rural townships, alongside income, age, race, disability, and the practical barriers that keep informal or underemployed workers outside formal opportunity.
Evidence. What do current data show about disparities related to this decision, and how reliable and recent are those data? Where is the evidence thin?
Participation. Who has been consulted, and who has not? Were affected residents at the table before the decision was taken, or informed only after it?
Benefit and burden. How are the promised benefits secured in writing, through hiring commitments, wage floors, local procurement, or infrastructure, and how are burdens mitigated? What is enforceable, and by whom?
Confidentiality boundary. What must properly remain confidential, for how long, and on what basis? What will be disclosed once that basis expires, and who certifies that the disclosure is accurate?
Accountability. How will we know whether the intended benefits materialized, and when will we report the results in public, including the places where we fell short?
Community Benefits, Written Down
Good intentions rarely survive contact with a signed deal unless they are written into it. The community benefits agreement, a contract between a developer and organized community representatives, emerged precisely because projects promoted as gains for a whole city often bypassed its lower-income neighborhoods. Such agreements, and the broader community benefits policies that attach standards to subsidized projects, can secure well-paid jobs, local and targeted hiring, living wages, affordable housing, and open space. They make the community’s expectations legible to every party before ground is broken. In smaller towns and rural counties, the model has most often been applied to large energy and industrial projects, where the scale of investment warrants a formal commitment.
The tool is only as good as its enforcement. A benefits agreement that lacks clear metrics, meaningful community participation, and a mechanism to hold the developer to account is a public-relations exercise rather than a commitment, and it can leave residents with less than they were promised. The test is not whether benefits are announced. It is whether they can be enforced, and by whom. That standard is consistent with Giugale’s larger point: inclusion that remains aspirational, without pathways into formal systems of work, identity, and accountability, leaves the same people behind.
Transparency, and Its Proper Limits
Public money invites public scrutiny, and the instruments of that scrutiny are well established. Good Jobs First, which has tracked development subsidies since 1998, argues that the public should be able to see, for every deal, which company received support, how much, what it promised in jobs and wages, and whether it delivered. Three further tools give that principle teeth: clawback provisions that recover public funds when a company fails to meet its commitments; public hearings and recorded votes, so that residents can weigh in before a decision and hold their representatives to it afterward; and a national accounting standard that requires governments to report the revenue they forgo through corporate tax abatements.
Against this stands a legitimate case for confidentiality, at least for a time. Companies conducting a site search generally prefer that their plans remain private until they are ready to announce, and the reasons are practical rather than sinister: premature disclosure can inflate land prices, erode a firm’s negotiating position, alarm employees at existing facilities, and invite competitors to bid away a site before terms are settled. Non-disclosure agreements and project code names are the ordinary means of managing this, and a small county that cannot keep a confidence will find itself quietly removed from consideration.
The error is to treat confidentiality as permanent or unbounded. It is neither. The better practice defines confidential categories narrowly, ties disclosure to the phases of a project, and never promises secrecy that would override the public’s right to records. Indiana law draws the line in almost exactly these terms. Under the state’s Access to Public Records Act, records of negotiations with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation need not be disclosed while those negotiations are in progress, but once they conclude, the terms of the final offer must be made available, and the disclosing body must certify that those terms are represented accurately and completely. Confidentiality delays disclosure; it does not cancel it.
We hold ourselves to a version of the same boundary in our own communications. We do not name programs that depend on grants not yet awarded. We announce partner funding on the partner’s timeline rather than our own, and only after review. We remove figures we cannot source, and we mark plainly what remains unverified. These are small disciplines, and they are the ones that let a reader trust the larger claims.
None of this is a brake on growth. It is the method by which a small county earns the confidence that growth requires, from the residents who live with its consequences and from the employers deciding whether our word is good. Equality of opportunity widens the pool of talent we can draw on. Transparency makes our incentives defensible. Written community benefits turn a promise into an asset. Taken together, they describe not a constraint on development, but the shape of development worth having. In Giugale’s terms, they are the practical means of ensuring that those who have been left behind are no longer invisible to the decisions that shape their county’s future.
Resources
“Code of Ethics.” International Economic Development Council, www.iedconline.org/pages/code-of-ethics/.
“Community Benefits Agreements: A Tool for More Equitable Development?” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2007, www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2007/community-benefits-agreements-a-tool-for-more-equitable-development.
“Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs): A Tool for Building Lasting Investments in Workers and Communities.” We Build Progress, PowerSwitch Action, 26 Feb. 2026, webuildprogress.org/explainer-2026-02-26-community-benefits-agreements.
“Confidentiality in the Site Selection Process Is Critical.” Strategic Development Group, 15 Jan. 2020, strategicdev.com/confidentiality-is-critical/.
Donahue, Ryan, et al. Committing to Inclusive Growth: Lessons for Metro Areas from the Inclusive Economic Development Lab. Brookings Institution, 2017.
Giugale, Marcelo M. Economic Development: What Everyone Needs to Know. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2017. Chapter 4, “Inclusion: Those Who Are Always Left Behind.”
Good Jobs First. “About.” Good Jobs First, goodjobsfirst.org/about/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.
Good Jobs First. “Beginner’s Guide.” Good Jobs First, goodjobsfirst.org/accountable-development/beginners-guide/.
Good Jobs First. “Key Reforms: Disclosure.” Good Jobs First, goodjobsfirst.org/accountable-development/key-reforms-disclosure.
Government Alliance on Race and Equity. Racial Equity Toolkit: An Opportunity to Operationalize Equity. GARE, 2015.
“How Business Leaders and Civic Partners in Small and Midsized U.S. Cities Can Advance Racial Equity and Inclusive Economic Growth.” Brookings Institution, 13 June 2024, www.brookings.edu/articles/how-business-leaders-and-civic-partners-in-small-and-midsized-u-s-cities-can-advance-racial-equity-and-inclusive-economic-growth/.
“Keeping Promises While Keeping Score: Gauging the Impacts of Policy Proposals on Racial Equity.” Brookings Institution, 5 Feb. 2024, www.brookings.edu/articles/keeping-score-measuring-the-impacts-of-policy-proposals-on-racial-equity/.
“Open Government Guide: Indiana.” Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, www.rcfp.org/open-government-guide/indiana/.
“The Surprisingly Short List of U.S. Metro Areas Achieving Inclusive Economic Growth.” Brookings Institution, www.brookings.edu/articles/the-surprisingly-short-list-of-u-s-metro-areas-achieving-inclusive-economic-growth/.
What Small Town and Rural Community Leaders Need to Know About Community Benefit Agreements. RuralOrganizing.org, 2024.