Brian Doherty on the Latest Progress in ‘Free Cities’ in Honduras

Back in January, the new administration of Honduran President
Juan Orlando Hernandez was hyping the possibility of what
were now officially called Zones for Economic Development and
Employment, or ZEDEs. The concept has been known by many names:
charter cities, LEAP (for “Legal, Economic, Administrative,
Political”) zones, free cities, and startup cities. The
general idea is creating zones within a country that can experiment
with different economic, regulatory, and legal systems than the
rest of the country—with the hope that these innovations might lead
that sector to prosper more than the country at large.

Honduras is—again—a step closer to creating such zones. As
interviews in July with many people involved in the process or
watching it eagerly for signs of real progress showed, it’s still
many steps away from them becoming real. 

It’s not surprising that the kind of radical, perhaps even
desperate, experimentation that ZEDEs represent would get the most
traction not in some place like Switzerland or Sweden, but a place
exactly as troubled as Honduras, as a sort of Hail Mary pass to
create some legal safety and economic sanity.

As Brian Doherty explains, the ZEDE concept has to fight against
local hostility, government corruption, and a possible turn toward
being merely business-friendly and not radically innovative on its
way to reality.

View this article.