In this presentation local and regional development will be discussed in the context of small and remote localities and within the extensive category of competition & welfare and intensive category of knowledge & learning. Empirical analysis comprises study materials collected during field courses in 1999-2010 from the Nordic and Baltic peripheries. In the focus are the research reports produced by international groups of master’s degree students. The effort is to re-read the reports in order to discover how the forthcoming experts interpret the development problems and solutions. The framework of analysis will utilize and develop the ideas of competitive industrial structures (Moss Kanter 1995) and the modes of local mobilization (Almås 1985). The findings based on reports argument more on behalf of market-oriented approaches than policy-driven strategies. Despite of that the strongest expectations are set on activities taken place in civil society and at the local level. Such contributions refer beyond everyday practices and towards the realms of tacit knowledge, ties and powers. These realms are both challenging to investigate and underestimated in nature. The important question, however, concerns the possibilities of experts to act as catalysts in the search of tacit/local knowledge. A further question consists of training capabilities of development work expertise. How to overcome various forms of binary thinking in scientific practices (subjective-objective, agency-structure, economy-politics/culture) and spatial change (centre-periphery, local-global, capital-labor, efficiency-equity)? The questions lead us to re-asset the powers, spaces and scales of action – who are the suppliers and customers, where do the innovations come from, how the objectives and achievements are defined and recognized, and in what extent development work will have its realizations especially in remote areas thanks to local and regional development policies.