UNIDO was among the first development agencies to define guidelines for the establishment of industrial parks in the 1990s.1 In the 2000s, several UNIDO publications addressed the issue of industrial parks such as UNIDO Industrial Development Report 2002/2003: Competing through Innovation and Learning and Industrial Development Report 2009: Breaking In and Moving Up: New Industrial Challenges for the Bottom Billion and the Middle Income Countries. A series of regional conferences on industrial parks were held from 2010 to 2015 in Azerbaijan, Slovenia and Belarus and led to related publications. These conferences facilitated networking, knowledge and experience-sharing among policymakers, practitioners and academics to better understand the role of a new generation of industrial parks and special economic zones and to build the capacity of public and private stakeholders to design, establish and manage industrial parks.
