Place-based strategies or territorial cooperation? Regional development in transnational perspective in Italy

Abstract

Italy has been at the forefront in the implementation of place-based regional development strategies during the 2000s, and it constitutes therefore a privileged point of view to investigate the contents of the approach, its potentialities as well as its limitations. In light of those limitations, several scholars have recently directed their attentions toward a typology of policies – territorial cooperation – which may be regarded as a trans-regional and transnational approach to regional development. In the paper, we offer a review of the main criticisms of place-based strategies and of the main distinctive dimensions and the potential value added of territorial cooperation initiatives, in light of recent debates about territorial vis-à-vis relational approaches to regional development. The identification of transnational spatial units, joint management authorities and trans-regional strategies, it is argued, may indeed help to overcome some of the limitations of place-based strategies – namely, the risk of policy capture, territorial introversion and communitarian confinement – while incurring in others – institutional isomorphism, technocratic management and democratic deficit. As the European political and economic space become increasingly trans-scalar and networked, the two policy domains may potentially learn from each other, and a new generation of local policies may emerge which are both territorial and relational, place-based and trans-regional.

Keywords

local development place-based approach Sicily (Italy)territorial cooperation transnational regionalism

Introduction

Italy has been at the forefront, among Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, in the adoption of place-based economic development strategies during 2000s. Regional development policies during those years underwent a substantial ‘territorial turn’ based on the decentralization of decision-making to sub-national governments and to local public–private partnerships, with the aim of implementing targeted and integrated strategies for local development, to provide collective goods and to strengthen cooperation between public authorities, private firms and civil society. Such a region-targeted and collaborative model has been of inspiration for both the European Commission and the OECD and informed subsequent proposals for a reform of European Cohesion Policies based on a ‘place-based approach’ (Barca, 2009). What those approaches have in common is an emphasis on the importance of regional specificities and local institutions, collaborative partnership and social capital.

Place-based approaches, in Italy as elsewhere, have not been exempt from criticisms. In the paper, we will provide a summary of those criticisms which have emphasized the risk of an excessive fragmentation of resources, the risk of ‘policy capture’ by local elites and the tendency towards inward-looking strategies, territorial introversion and institutional isomorphism.

Whereas place-based strategies are often confronted with the ‘place-neutral’ approach (in)famously proposed by the World Bank in 2009 (Barca et al., 2012; Hildreth and Bailey, forthcoming; Turok, 2013; World Bank, 2009), in this paper, we wish to engage in a different kind of confrontation. The advantages and limits of place-based approaches will be assessed in light of recent debates about territorial versus relational approaches to regional development (Amin, 2004; McCann and Ward, 2010; MacLeod and Jones, 2007; Jones and Paasi, 2013). In contrast with the territorial understanding of places as bounded and fixed, proponents of a relational approach emphasize the need for a politics of ‘place beyond place’ (Massey et al., 2009), exhorted to keep ‘regions unbound’ (Amin, 2004) and to adopt a networked, trans-local and topological perspective in regional development (Bristow, 2010; Faludi, 2012; Pierce et al., 2011). These perspectives propose a new ethic of place-to-place relations based on responsibility and radical regional openness (Massey, 2004) but are, at times, excessively normative and theoretical. They promise a new approach which is supposed to go beyond the obsession for competition between places that dominated regional policies during the last decades but that is also difficult to translate into concrete policy instruments.

The main questions developed in the paper will therefore be the following: to what extent are place-based approaches based on a territorial spatial imaginary and what are the consequences? What are the affinities and divergences between place-based approaches and relational perspectives to regional development? How may such a relational approach (potentially) overcome the limitations of place-based strategies? How can it be properly operationalized, in which policy domains and through which policy instruments?

In order to address this last issue, in the remaining part of the paper, we will reflect upon a policy domain where, in our opinion, a comparison between territorial and relational perspectives is particularly relevant: territorial cooperation. With this term, we refer to the set of initiatives – including cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation – supported mainly by the European Cohesion Policy and aimed to promote trans-local cooperation across European borders. Our aim is to compare place-based strategies with territorial cooperation policies, summarizing the main value added – with respect to more traditional regional development policies – of those trans-regional and transnational cooperation initiatives that encourage localities from different States and regions to launch joint development programmes and to exchange knowledge and (best) practices.

The case of Sicily will be used for illustrative purposes. In-depth interviews with policy experts which have been actively involved in the design and implementation of the two typologies of policies in Sicily will assist in the comparative assessment of the advantages and limits of both place-based strategies and territorial cooperation initiatives.

Local development policies and the place-based approach in Italy

During the 1990s and 2000s regional development policies in Italy – as elsewhere – underwent a substantial ‘territorial turn’. The inadequacies of previous centralistic and top-down approaches (Trigilia, 1994), the crisis of the Keynesian state and the need to foster ‘competition between places’ and ‘glocalization’ prompted several reforms inspired by the experience of Marshallian industrial districts, the third Italy and by scholarly debates about territorialism, new regionalism and place-based approaches to regional development (Bonomi and De Rita, 1998; Cersosimo and Wolleb, 2006; Solari, 2004; Trigilia, 2005).

The programmes that we refer to – which were defined as ‘local development’ programmes – have been experimental but captured the attention of many scholars and experts being a paradigmatic example of what is today defined as a place-based approach, which differs in many respects to traditional regional development strategies. After some spontaneous experiences at the beginning of the 1990s, local development policies were launched in Italy in 1998 with the Programmazione Negoziata programme. The programme, funded by the Italian government, received around the 20% of national resources for regional development in lagging regions from 2000 to 2006 (Trigilia, 2011: 49) and introduced several instruments among which the Territorial Pacts had been particularly successful. The same model was later appropriated by the European Commission with the launch of Territorial Pacts for Employment in 1998, and within EU-funded Cohesion Policies beginning in 2003, by reserving a portion of regional programmes’ resources for the financing of Territorial Integrated Projects in Southern Italy. A similar approach has been adopted in the domain of rural development since 1991 through the Leader programme and the constitution of Local Action Groups. Finally, similar place-based initiatives are going to be experimented at the European level in the 2014–2020 programming period of Cohesion funds, through the recently launched Integrated Territorial Investments and the Community-Led Local Development initiatives.

What those experiments have in common, and in which they differ from standard regional development policies, is their place-based orientation. First, they are based on the delimitation of specific sub-regions which do not correspond to any administrative delimitation: functional and homogenous regions which possess a particular specialization and even a common cultural identity, and may constitute the basis for an endogenous, embedded and ‘appropriated’ regional development strategy (Dematteis, 1994: 13). Second, such initiatives aim to coordinate and to integrate different funds and sectors, with the aim of addressing both the economic and non-economic dimensions of regional development, to complement direct incentives to firms with indirect and contextual improvements and the provision of collective goods (Bonomi and De Rita, 1998). The aim is, moreover, to anticipate or to guide the selection of projects which are usually undertaken during the implementation stage, by designing a coherent, targeted and articulated programme focused on a clear leading objective. Third, local development initiatives are based on the active involvement of a wide range of local public, private and representative actors (Table 1), both during the programming and the implementation stage, not only because those organizations can contribute with their local knowledge to a better expression of local preferences, but also with the aim of inducing them to collaborate in order to strengthen informal institutions and social capital.

Table 1.

Organizations participating and managing Territorial Integrated Projects in Southern Italian regions, 2003–2006.

Organization typology	Management authority	Participants to the local partnerships	Organization typology	Participants to the local partnerships
Municipality	32.7%	47.5%	Environmental agency	2.5%
Development agency	20.4%	1.8%	National authority	1.9%
Administrative Region	17.7%	1.0%	School. training centre	1.9%
Inter-municipal authority	13.3%	2.1%	Tourism agency	1.7%
Administrative Province	10.6%	2.3%	Bank	1.6%
Natural park	3.5%	0.6%	Chamber of commerce	1.5%
Industrial agency	1.8%	1.1%	Social organization	1.5%
Employers association	–	16.0%	University	1.4%
Firm, cooperative	–	6.9%	Religious authority	0.5%
Trade Union	–	6.2%	Total	100%

Source: Elaboration based on Formez (http://sviluppolocale.formez.it).

Such an approach has been extraordinarily innovative and is still considered a major source of inspiration for advocates of a (reformed cohesion policy based on a) place-based approach to regional development (Barca, 2009). As such, it can also be a privileged point of view to understand the limits and the degenerative tendencies of place-based strategies.

Place-based policies in Italy: A sympathetic critique

It goes beyond the scope of this article to discuss in length or to provide an exhaustive evaluation of place-based initiatives in Italy, where impacts have been highly differentiated in space and time.¹ There is a growing consensus, however, that the results of such reforms have been far below initial expectations (Trigilia, 2011: 48), causing discontent and leading to more recent attempts at a partial ‘re-centralization’ of regional policies (Perulli, 2010).

In this section, we will focus on a number of criticisms that, in our opinion, are of particular relevance for current debates about the pros and cons of placed-based approaches to regional development and for a comparative assessment of such territorial approach with the transnational and relational approaches that we will discuss in the remaining part of the paper.

The same proponents of a place-based approach have highlighted the risk that excessive decentralization may cause fragmentation of strategies and resources, and ‘institutional chaos’, at the expense of coordination both between places and between scales (Burroni et al., 2005: 440).

The ‘local’ orientation of place-based strategies, moreover, and the emphasis on place specificities and regional specialization, is often paralleled to a tendency towards territorial introversion, inward-looking strategies and ‘communitarian confinement’ (Barca et al., 2012: 147). An excessive ‘localism’ may indeed induce an underestimation of the importance of trans-regional relations and institutions, the role of processes and actors that transcend regional borders (Harrison, 2006), the need to cooperate across regional boundaries and enhance inter-place complementarities and synergies (Perulli, 2010: 383), in an era in which local development is more than ever dependent upon trans-regional connections and complex, multi-faced, transnational place-to-place relationships.

Local autonomy, moreover, has often been accompanied by an excessive obsession for ‘competition between territories’ and with a sort of ‘territorial egoism’ which challenges the possibility for solidarity between places and for an ethic of place-to-place relationships which is today even more needed in light of the global financial crisis and the disruption of national and sub-national governments’ finance.

Decentralization is supposed to increase governments’ accountability, by bringing politics ‘closer’ to citizens, but the result is often the opposite: to increase the risk of ‘policy capture’ by local elites (Barca et al., 2012; Trigilia, 2011). In many cases, it has been argued, local partnerships function as ‘collusive coalitions’ aimed solely at controlling the attraction and distribution of public resources (Cersosimo and Wolleb, 2001: 370; Dąbrowski, forthcoming). The risk is that place-targeting, integration and collaborative management remain confined to the programming phase while, during the implementation, programmes turn into nothing more than a sum of unrelated individual projects whose prioritization is dependent on the weight of particular interests.

Rather than giving expression to the specificities of each region, local strategies are often very similar, consisting of a mere policy-transfer and in the acritical application of the same blue-print model everywhere (Picchieri, 2001: 255–256), with a high risk of ‘institutional isomorphism’ (Perulli, 2010: 387) in contrast to the idea that place-based policies should promote differentiation and experimentalism (Barca, 2009).

Impacts and outcomes are very much dependent upon local circumstances and are particularly problematic in regions where institutions are weak and lack adequate experience and technical capacities (Barbera, 2011: 422), as we will see has been the case of Sicily.

The consequences of these degenerative tendencies are indicated in the same Barca Report as the tendency for

investment being favoured in activities which are inappropriate (…); responsibility for guiding and monitoring being abdicated in the name of subsidiarity, entrenching existing elites by propping up ineffective institutions and fuelling rent-extracting machines; (…) a failure of coordination, with under-provision of some public goods and services and overprovision of others. (Barca, 2009: 27)

Solutions to those degenerative tendencies are indicated by the proponents of a place-based approach in the strengthening of coordination, technical assistance and controls by supra-regional institutions, through multi-level governance (Barca, 2009; Barca et al., 2012; Elcock, forthcoming; Perulli, 2010). We may say that the proposal is to complement territorialism and place-based strategies with a scalar (re)organization of roles, checks and balances, while promoting open public debates on the contents and the outcomes of regional strategies in order to enhance local ownership and to increase the ‘moral cost’ of opportunistic behaviours (Trigilia, 2011: 68).

Place-based strategies and territorial versus relational approaches to regional development

Scholarly debates about regional development processes and policies have been increasingly dominated, in the last years, by the controversy between relational versus territorial perspectives. The initial enthusiasm with the ‘resurgence of regions’ during the nineties has led to some dissatisfactions which, according to the proponents of a relational politics, are due to a particular understanding of regions as bounded territorial entities (Allen and Cochrane, 2007; Bristow, 2010; Faludi, 2012; Massey, 2005; Massey et al., 2009). According to those authors, a relational approach based on radical regional openness should be adopted, which is supposed to overcome the limitations of territorial perspectives, but which is also difficult to translate into concrete policy prescriptions.

Following Amin (2004), it can be said that such a relational approach is constituted by a ‘politics of propinquity’ and a ‘politics of connectivity’. The politics of propinquity is based on the idea that regions are assemblages of identities, perceptions and interests which may be impossible to aggregate. Whereas place-based strategies are based on consensus-seeking among representative actors and stakeholders, relational approaches emphasize cultural diversity, social conflict and agonistic relationships. The second distinctive dimension of a relational approach, the politics of connectivity, portrays regions as ‘nodes that gather flow and juxtapose diversity, places of overlapping – but not necessarily locally connected – relational networks’ (Amin, 2004: 34). According to this view, place-based strategies are based instead upon a territorial imaginary which explain most of their limitations and degenerations. This is not to say that such a relational dimension is completely excluded from debates on new regionalism. Local development and place-based strategies are indeed based on the strengthening of both local specificities and trans-regional relations. According to the proponents of a relational approach, however, relations between places and their exterior are often confined, on the hand, to a scalar interpretation focused on a binomial opposition between the local and the global and, on the other hand, on an excessive obsession for competition between places. Such limitations, according to this view, are first of all implied in the attempt to delimit regions within clearly defined boundaries, usually the first step of any place-based approach to regional development. The specific spatial imaginary that is implicit in the new regionalism leads to over-emphasize, in the practical implementation of place-based strategies, internal dynamics in respect to external connections. The proposal is to substitute fixed, bounded, nested and geometric imaginations which are typical of the new regionalism, with a geographical imaginary that is networked, open and topological. Place-to-place relations, according to relational accounts, should not be limited to the usual interplay between competition and cooperation but should be based instead upon networking and complementarities, and upon a new ethic of responsibility and solidarity (Massey, 2004).

Place-based strategies, moreover, do often rely on the assumption that a local approach to regional development is, per se, preferable with respect to any non-local approach: a sort of ‘local trap’ (Purcell, 2006) that induces the attribution of an intrinsically positive value to local relations and an interpretation of the local scale as a ‘space of resistance’ against globalization and deterritorialization (Cox, 1997; Magnaghi, 2000). As stated by Doreen Massey (2001), however, ‘scale in itself is not the issue (…). Neither local nor global, in itself, is on the side of the righteous (whatever your political persuasion); it depends on the social relations within which each is embedded’ (p. 16).

A strict opposition between territorial and relational approaches is useful for analytical and illustrative purposes but it comes up short when referring to concrete policy domains which are often based on a mixture of territorial and relational imaginaries. A relational dimension – as already stated – is indeed inherent in most proposals for a place-based approach both in terms of the politics of connectivity and the politics of propinquity recalled above (Barca, 2009; Dematteis, 1994; Jonas, 2012). A strict association of place-based approaches with a territorial understanding of regions is often based on a caricature of the latter (Morgan, 2007). More recent research warns against dismissing the regional dimension too quickly, suggesting to avoid one-dimensionalism and to adopt instead conceptions of places which are at the same time territorial and relational (Harrison, 2013; Jessop et al., 2008; McCann and Ward, 2010; MacLeod and Jones, 2007).

In the specific case of place-based policies in Italy, many authors have suggested not to ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’ (Trigilia, Sole24ore, 03.15.2006). What is needed, it is argued, is to overcome the limits of past experiments in their practical implementation while continuing to stress the potentialities of the original proposal: the need to define place-targeted, multi-actor and integrated regional development policies, as opposed to a recent tendency to resuscitate the top-down and ‘sector-based’ approach to regional development which has already proven to be inefficient and ineffective (Perulli, 2010).

Territorial cooperation as a trans-regional approach to regional development?

A number of scholars have recently directed their attention towards interregional, intercity and transnational configurations as potential new geographical units for the implementation of regional development and spatial policies (Deas and Lord, 2006; García-Álvarez and Trillo-Santamaría, 2013; Perkmann and Sum, 2002; Scott, 1999; Shaw et al., forthcoming).

In the field of spatial planning, this is nothing new. Trans-regional spatial planning in Italy was first experimented in the early 1980s, with the MI-TO programme for the joint planning of the Turin and Milan area. More recently, the Minister of Infrastructure charged the Italian Planners Society with identifying ‘strategic territorial platforms’, i.e. transnational and interregional units for the implementation of EU cohesion policy 2007–2013 (MI, 2007; Rivolin, 2010). Similar initiatives have been strongly promoted by European institutions in the framework of the European Spatial Development Perspective since 1999 and, more recently, the Territorial Agenda 2020.

In the domain of regional development, a trans-regional perspective is more original as it breaks a long tradition of policies strongly focused on the regional and the local scale. These proposals refer mainly to a typology of regional policies which is not new, and which is not exclusively aimed at regional development, but is increasing its relevance both within scholarly and policy communities: territorial cooperation, i.e. cross-border initiatives, transnational and interregional cooperation (Figure 1). These initiatives have been supported by the European Union since 1990 in the framework of the Interreg programme and constitute today one of the three priority objectives of the EU Cohesion policy.

Figure 1.

Territorial cooperation initiatives in Italy, 2013.

In the case of Italy, an explicit proposal has been made by Perulli (2010) to overcome the limitations of place-based strategies by strengthening the macro-regional scale in the design and implementation of regional development policies. A similar argument has been recently formulated by the Italian Geographical Society (Salone and Rossi, 2013), and in both cases, European territorial cooperation is indicated as one of the main sources of inspiration.

In light of the debates discussed in the previous paragraph, we should ask first whatever territorial cooperation may be regarded as a networked/relational approach to regional development or whatever it resumes a territorial understanding of places and regions, albeit in the form of ‘cross-border’, ‘unbounded’ or ‘unusual’ regionalism (Deas and Lord, 2006; García-Álvarez and Trillo-Santamaría, 2013; Scott, 1999; Soja, 2005). For European institutions, territorial cooperation is not only aimed at promoting the idea of a ‘borderless Europe’, but also that of a ‘Europe of regions’ where sub-national authorities increase their protagonism and international projection. The idea is that to address ‘common challenges’ we need to transcend nationally based administrative systems and political boundaries. Through the support of European regions in their paradiplomatic activities (Aldecoa and Keating, 1999), territorial cooperation goes beyond the same subsidiarity principle, according to which nation states have exclusive competences in the domain of foreign politics.

However, territorial cooperation initiatives are not exempt from what Painter (2008) defined as the ‘cartographic anxiety’, i.e. the obsession to delimit bounded and more or less contiguous territorial entities even if such entities are, in this case, trans-regional and cross-border. The idea to promote region-building across national borders is strongly emphasized within many territorial cooperation initiatives which indeed often link regions with a common historical and cultural heritage. The narratives that these initiatives adopt are not very different from those of traditional place-based policies, resulting in a mixture of a purely territorial perspective with an emphasis on regional specificities, local institutions and territorial social capital and a relational perspective, more open and trans-local.

The real issue is, consequently, what the main differences between territorial cooperation and traditional place-based development policies are and how those differences translate into specific spatial configurations, decision-making and implementation procedures. These differences are summarized in Table 2 and discussed in the next pages.

Table 2.

The specificities of place-based strategies and territorial cooperation.

	Place-based strategies	Territorial cooperation
Key concepts	Economic and social cohesion, place-based approach, new regionalism, territorialism	Territorial cohesion, transnationalism, trans-localism, policy transfer, paradiplomacy
Geographical imaginary	Territorial and multi-level	Territorial-relational and trans-local
Geographic configuration	Contiguous areas of various size	Contiguous (or non contiguous) trans-regional and transnational areas
Management authorities	Sub-national authorities or regional development agencies	Joint management authorities
Projects’ proponents	Local private and public subjects	Transnational networks
Stakeholders involvement	Programme-based. Sub-national authorities and the civil society	Projects based. Internal and external partnerships
Eligible regions	Lagging or declining regions	All
Main objective	Regional development	To address common challenges
Strategies/narratives	Regional specificities, collective goods, social capital	Trans-local relations and synergies
Projects funded	Firms’ subsidies and collective goods	Regional development, spatial planning, exchange of best practices

The first difference of territorial cooperation in respect to place-based strategies is in the delimitation of trans-regional and transnational spatial units, which implies the identification of joint management authorities. The trans-regional dimension of territorial cooperation, in other words, is not only inherent in the strategies that those programmes put forward but also in the procedures by which the initiatives are designed and implemented. In this, territorial cooperation is similar to other EU programmes, like for example in the field of research and innovation, where initiatives are managed by transnational partnerships.

Individual projects funded within territorial cooperation programmes have a trans-regional orientation as well and are based on the identification of transnational partnerships and actors’ networks in which administrative authorities have a leading – and at times exclusive – role. As already mentioned, the aim is not to promote regional development in general – EU-funded territorial cooperation cannot indeed provide incentives to private firms – but to address specific challenges through coordinated local development initiatives, cross-border spatial planning, the exchange of best practices and paradiplomacy.

Territorial cooperation contributes, moreover, to a more general evolution of the language of regional policies which was once limited to issues of economic development. The rhetoric of ‘cooperation’, which is diffused among all EU policies, is in this case the main object and rationality of the initiatives. It is worth mentioning that when cross-border cooperation was first launched during the early 1990s, only lagging regions were eligible for EU funding whereas today the entire European territory is covered. The idea is to address common challenges, whatever the nature of those challenges, implying a functional and issue-oriented approach which is different from the more generalist aims of traditional regional policies. Through the exchange of ‘best practices’ and cooperation across borders, territorial cooperation initiatives promote, moreover, policy transfers between regions and a more general process of policy convergence and Europeanization (Dühr et al., 2007). Instead of focusing solely on local specificities and endogenous resources, these initiatives offer the possibility of strengthening complementarities and synergies between places. Indeed, they contribute to the ongoing rescaling and increasing complexity of the European polity, while offering the opportunity for a better coordination of policies and strategies at a plurality of geographical scales.

This is not to say that, as such, territorial cooperation initiatives are necessarily exempt from some of the main limits of place-based policies. Their trans-regional dimension should contribute to avoid an excessive territorial introversion, but the degree to which this is true should be verified empirically. Moreover, the policy mechanism itself does not offer any specific value added with respect to the risks of excessive fragmentation, policy capture or ‘institutional isomorphism’ described earlier. In what follows we will attempt to provide some preliminary evidence in this regard, by comparing place-based strategies and territorial cooperation or, more precisely, by evaluating the latter through the same lens by which the former has been evaluated.

Territorial cooperation versus place-based strategies: The case of Sicily

Place-based strategies and territorial cooperation initiatives in Sicily

The aim of this section is to support the analysis presented in the previous sections with an illustrative example: the Italian Region of Sicily. Sicily is one of the most problematic lagging regions in Italy and Europe and has consequently been a crucial place for experimentations in the field of regional development including the ‘local development’ model whose strengths and limits were described in section three (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Local development initiatives in Sicily, 2000–2010.

The fist experiences with local development programmes date back to the end of the 1990s and have been supported by national funds within the ‘Programmazione Negoziata’ programme (Territorial Pacts) and by the EU funds for rural development, within the Leader+ programme. In the 2000–2006 period, a similar model was adopted within the EU-funded Structural Funds by reserving approximately 1.4 billion Euros to the implementation of Integrated Territorial Projects (Progetti Integrati Territoriali, PITs); 27 PITs were established, receiving an average of 35 millions Euros each. Indicative of the difficulties that the implementation of local development initiatives implied, and due to the Regional authority’s will to avoid excessive decentralization of decision procedures and resources, the experience of PITs has not been replicated during the 2007–2013 programming period (PO FESR Sicilia, 2013: 249). According to the Regional authority, PITs have been relevant for institutional learning and innovative in terms of organizational procedures, but turned out to be excessively ‘localistic’ in their strategies, failing to favour the international projection of the region, or to support its capacity to connect globally through tangible and intangible networks (PO FESR Sicilia, 2013: 113).

Internationalization has been one of the main objectives during the 2007–2013 period (PO FESR Sicilia, 2013: 130) and this is one of the reasons why, on the other hand, the opportunities offered by territorial cooperation initiatives have been initially highly welcomed, in Sicily as elsewhere in Italy. In terms of effective achievements, however, it should be mentioned that the outcomes of the initiatives reported in Figure 1 have been very much dependent on contingent and contextual circumstances. In the North of Italy, regions have a long tradition of transnational cooperation and a strong political and economic international projection. The first working communities (Figure 1) were created in the 1970s and, more recently, the constitution of Euroregions and Macro-regions has been strongly emphasized by regionalist political parties like the Northern League, as a means of reaffirming the political autonomy of Northern regions with respect to national authorities. Along the Adriatic basin, there is a significant tradition of ‘decentralized cooperation’ with the Balkans regions – originating in the 1990s as a response to military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia – which led to the constitution of an Adriatic Euroregion, in 2006, and an Adriatic-Ionian Macro-region, in 2012. In Southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, the situation is more problematic. In this case, cooperating regions are separated by wide seas; some of them belong to a very different polity and have a weak tradition of inter-institutional dialogue. Notwithstanding Sicily is one of the Italian regions where administrative and political autonomy is the strongest, it lacks a tradition of paradiplomatic activities and is one of the only two Regions in Italy (together with Campania) that has never approved a specific law to regulate and to support international cooperation.

Territorial cooperation initiatives in the Region have not developed autonomously but have been strongly guided by the availability of EU funds and by European guidelines. National authorities have tried to support territorial cooperation between Sicily and Tunisia in the framework of the APQ Mediterraneo,² but the programme was never activated in the region due to some management problems at the regional level.

Today, only two cross-border cooperation programmes exist: the Sicily-Malta programme, operating since 2000 in the framework of EU Cohesion policies, and the Sicily-Tunisia programme, operating since 2007 in the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy. The two programmes cover only a limited portion of the Sicilian territory and have limited resources in respect to the mainstream of EU-funded regional policies: approximately 30 million Euros each in the 2007–2013 period. Sicily, moreover, is part of two transnational cooperation programme covering the whole Mediterranean basin: the Med Programme funded by EU Cohesion policy and the ENPI CBC Mediterranean Sea Basin Programme.

Territorial cooperation versus place-based strategies in Sicily

In this section, we summarize the results of a series of interviews realized between October 2012 and July 2013. The interviews were carried out in three steps: the first step was the collection of 102 structured interviews about the perspectives for territorial cooperation between Sicily and Tunisia and about the opportunities offered by territorial cooperation initiatives in this frame. Interviewees where Sicilian and national stakeholders selected through the snowball sampling methodology among those that have institutional, commercial or socio-cultural relations with Tunisian partners. Second, 29 stakeholders were selected that are the most active in transnational cooperation with Tunisia for in-depth interviews on the same topic. Finally, among those 29 stakeholders, eight have been selected that have been actively involved in the design and implementation of both place-based policies and territorial cooperation programmes in Sicily, for additional in-depth interviews aimed at the comparative assessment of the two policy domains. Four of the eight interviewees were professional experts (PE), four were public officials (PO) at the national (PO1), regional (PO2, PO3) and local scale (PO4). In what follows, we will report a number of points about which we registered a substantial agreement among the interviewees.

Notwithstanding the difficulties reported in the previous sub-section in the implementation of territorial cooperation initiatives, almost all of the interviewees agreed that the institutionalization and funding of trans-regional relations is crucial not only for inter-institutional dialogue, but for regional development as well, insofar as a number of problematic issues – e.g. the management of fishing, migration flows, agricultural trade – are transnational in scope and cannot be tackled by regional institutions alone. The value added of territorial cooperation in respect to local development initiatives, in this frame, is not only in that it allows to identify the correct scale but, mostly, to strengthen relations that are crucial to address the above mentioned problems. According to our interviewees, the transnational orientation of territorial cooperation initiatives induces local actors to overcome the tendency towards inward-looking strategies that characterized many local development initiatives and to emphasize trans-regional interdependencies and complementarities between places. Networking with extra-regional partners is considered an important source for new ideas and new solutions which would not otherwise emerge from exclusively local programmes. The exchange of knowledge and policy practices is indeed regarded as the most relevant opportunity offered by transnational initiatives.

The exchange of experiences is a key element as it widens local development perspectives. Those benefits are clear even when the programme is limited to the transfer of knowledge, because this confrontation offers the opportunity to learn and to exchange both good and bad practices. (PE1)

Territorial Cooperation Programmes are small, pilot programmes, but they are useful because they put around the table people that wouldn’t otherwise cooperate. Establishing day to day relations, these people can open their minds and use this openness to show the opportunities offered by cooperation to their territories. (PO1)

Furthermore, networking with extra-regional partners help territories to overcome the obsession for competition, in favour of a logic of cooperation and exchange: ‘One of the main positive aspects of territorial cooperation programmes is that they are structured in a logic of bilateral, peer to peer cooperation’ (PE2).

Beside being excessively ‘localistic’ in their scope, place-based strategies in Sicily suffered from most of the degenerative tendencies described earlier. Both nationally funded and EU-funded local development initiatives, according to our interviewees, have not been sufficiently focused and consisted of a list of individual projects with few relations between one another and with limited impact.

Despite the great initial enthusiasm, there have been many problems in the practical implementation of these initiatives. [Notwithstanding the attempts to integrate private investments with the provision of collective goods] the only tools available have been basically incentives to firms. Territorial Pacts often translated in a list of incentives to local firms, without a coherent strategy. There was a disconnection between the ‘vision’ of place-based strategies and their concrete impact, also due to procedural inadequacies. Furthermore, some problems and slowdowns derived from an excessively bureaucratized implementation. The bottom-up model, on paper, was innovative and relevant, but there was not a real negotiation, due to the lack of adequate management. One of the biggest problems is that the ‘participation’ mechanism is inefficient; as a consequence, decision-making is in the hands of project managers and local development professionals, which are not real stakeholders. (PE2)

The reasons behind those failures were indicated in the lack of adequate financial instruments (often limited to traditional subsidies to SMEs), the lack of inter-temporal, inter-sectoral and inter-scalar coordination, the inability to capitalize from previous experiences and a weakness of local political authorities whose leading role has been often substituted by trans-regional ‘local development professionals’. The most problematic consequences have been technocratic management, policy capture and rent-seeking, under-representation of local priorities and the replication of similar strategies in different settings.

To what extent the logic of territorial cooperation may help to overcome these degenerative tendencies?

The value added of territorial cooperation is not obvious. There might be, in the case a certain project is well functioning. However this is not always the case; it very much depends on the quality of the single project. (PE1)

Notwithstanding the difficulties, expressed by various stakeholders, in comparing instruments that are different in their scope and aims, and in abstracting from the contingent circumstances that influenced the outcome of any single initiative, according to our interviewees territorial cooperation can indeed provide a value-added in some crucial aspects.

In terms of management procedures, the constitution of joint transnational authorities is considered to have a positive impact, both in terms of a more effective management of initiatives and in lowering the risk of policy capture. Also at the project level, the transnational dimension favours efficiency and commitment from partners as it raises the moral cost of inefficient and opportunistic behaviours. Furthermore, the adoption of priorities pre-defined at the European level and the strong coordination role delegated to the Joint Management Authority limits the risk of institutional chaos and excessive fragmentation (Perulli, 2010; Salone and Rossi, 2013).

On the other hand, territorial cooperation initiatives are not exempt from some of the criticisms directed towards place-based strategies. If it is true that trans-regional strategies might offer a relevant strategic value added, their actual implementation is difficult and the risk that during the implementation stage those strategies will translate into a sum of unrelated individual projects is high, although lower than in the case of local development initiatives.

The issue of participation is problematic as well. The importance that local partnerships have in the design of place-targeted strategies within local development programmes is almost completely absent within territorial cooperation initiatives where ex-ante participation is episodic and complementary. The contents of transnational programmes are strongly influenced by European and national guidelines without the active involvement of local stakeholders. There is a high risk, consequently, that local specificities and priorities are obscured and that similar strategies are replicated into different contexts, implying a risk of ‘institutional isomorphism’ and a low degree of local ownership with a weak appropriation from local actors, negatively affecting the programmes’ impact. ‘Territorial cooperation programmes follow often a top-down process, without a real ownership of local beneficiaries’ (PO4).

Not only the civil society, but even local public authorities are often marginalized from territorial cooperation initiatives and supplemented by policy experts. Different from local development programmes, the active involvement of local actors within territorial cooperation initiatives is postponed to the implementation stage when projects proposers are required to constitute transnational networks and partnerships. The effective role of those networks is weak and very much dependent on any single funded project.

Furthermore, the transnational nature of territorial cooperation programmes poses some specific problems in the interaction between stakeholders: language differences and physical distance, for example, are the most frequently mentioned barriers to cooperation and coordination in the perception of our interviewees. The complexity of bureaucratic procedures discourage participation from local actors which are indeed very active in the field of transnational cooperation, but which do not possess the organizational and technical capabilities needed to candidate for EU funding.

The risk of a technocratic and exclusionary management, already mentioned in the case of local development policies, actually seems stronger in the case of transnational cooperation where the rigidity of European rules, the lack of local ownership and linguistic differences strengthen the role of professional project managers. According to our interviewees, the leading role of technicians had a positive impact on the quality and efficiency of programmes but challenged the possibility for a democratic control of initiatives and for their differentiation and targeting.

Conclusions

The rescaling of the European space, and the challenges arising from the financial crisis, require regions to reformulate state-civil society-business relations and to increase their role in promoting regional development. In this frame, the place-based model and experiments conducted in Italy in the field of local development still constitute a major source of inspiration but have generated criticisms and even attempts at a partial re-centralization of regional policies. The main limits of place-based policies have been indicated in the risk of policy capture, territorial introversion, communitarian confinement, strategic fragmentation, institutional isomorphism and technocratic management.

Several scholars have attributed those limitations to a territorial understanding of regions as bounded and fixed, and instead proposed the adoption of a relational perspective based on radical regional openness. Place-based policies are indeed based on a mixture of territorial and relational imaginaries, but the latter tend to be normatively downplayed in the actual implementation of policies which over-emphasized the importance of local relations, and under-evaluated the importance of place-to-place relations and supra-regional institutions.

Territorial cooperation initiatives, in this frame, have been regarded as a potential new venue for the implementation of a sort of ‘unbounded’ or ‘transnational’ regionalism: a ‘territorial-relational’ approach to regional development which may indeed help to overcome some of the limitations of purely regional strategies.

The identification of transnational spatial units and trans-regional strategies decreases the tendency towards territorial introversion and communitarian confinement, which is typical of many place-based policies, and induces an emphasis of place-to-place interdependencies and synergies. The constitution of joint management authorities and transnational partnerships favours efficiency and commitment from partners and decreases the risk of policy capture by increasing the moral costs of inefficiencies, opportunisms and rent-seeking behaviours.

The exchange of knowledge and policy practices with extra-regional actors is regarded as the main value added of territorial cooperation. Policy transfers across regional borders can indeed provide new solutions to common challenges but may as well increase the risk of institutional and strategic isomorphism.

Technical problems like language differences and physical distance, the complexity of funding procedures and the lack of an active involvement of local stakeholders increase the risk of a technocratic management of territorial cooperation initiatives at the expenses of local ownership, place-targeting and democratic control.

The need to differentiate strategies according to the diversity of regional contexts, to identify the proper balance between regional autonomy and multi-level governance and to promote participation by citizens and stakeholders are often indicated as the solutions to some of the limits of a place-based approach. These limits are indeed even stronger in the case of territorial cooperation initiatives. In this, the local development model described in the article, with its emphasis on collaborative management and regional differentiation, can indeed constitute a source of inspiration for a reformed approach to territorial cooperation based on both local ownership and trans-regional openness.

Territorial cooperation is still in its experimental stage and it is limited in terms of fundable activities. Moreover, the limitation of these initiatives for cooperation across national borders prevents the up-scaling of the model and its application to different situations. The research findings reported in the previous sections about the specific case of Sicily, finally, should be explored further and verified also in other regions or countries in order to be generalized.

The adoption of a place-based approach, to conclude, is a necessary condition to pursue the differentiation and targeting of regional development strategies, but may not be enough, and its degenerative tendencies should be carefully taken into account. A more trans-regional orientation of both the strategic contents of regional policies, and of their implementation procedures, can help to avoid some of those degenerative tendencies but is not exempt from some of the same criticisms. In this, place-based strategies on the one hand, and territorial cooperation on the other hand, may potentially learn from each other and a new generation of regional policies may potentially emerge which are both place-based and trans-regional, territorial and relational, and which may build upon the lessons learned from the experience of local development policies together with the new opportunities offered by a European polity which is increasingly trans-scalar and networked.

Footnotes

Funding

The research was supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013, Grant Agreement n. 266920: EUROBORDERREGIONS. European Regions, EU External Borders and the Immediate Neighbours. Analysing Regional Development Options through Policies and Practices of Cross-Border Co-operation. The EC is not liable for any use that can be made on the information contained herein.

Notes

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