Territorial Impact Assessment Of National And Regional Territorial Cohesion In Italy

This book presents a comprehensive debate and analysis of existing Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA) methodologies, designed under the auspices of the ESPON programme since the mid-2000s. This is intended to serve as a TIA handbook for the reader, to better understand the main differences, advantages and shortcomings of each presented TIA methodology. It also serves as a manual for professors and students in the field of policy evaluation, and territorial analysis, as it presents concrete examples of the implementation of each TIA methodology, their formulas and intrinsic evaluation elements. The purpose of policy evaluation methodologies is to check the main effects of private and public investments, in order to report back to policymakers and citizens on their efficiency and effectiveness. Over the past decades, both in Europe and worldwide, there has been an increasingly awareness of the need to implement/reinforce policy evaluation practices, at all territorial levels. At the same time, it has become widely accepted that many policy interventions produce impacts in more than one dimensions of territorial development. In this context, the use of a holistic and territorial approach for policy impact assessment evaluation has rapidly been adopted by the European Commission as a mainstream policy evaluation procedure.

The recent worldwide economic crisis requires a new focus on the theoretical framework of analysis of local development. Particular attention has been devoted to the study of the role of territories, no longer conceived as pure geographic spaces, but rather an important resource that can generate externalities that favor local territorial competitiveness. Key concepts such as the "industrial district" by the Italian scholars (Becattini, 1990; Sforzi, 1991; Signorini, 2004), the Marshallian "production cluster" (Marshall, 1920) and the French districts industriels (Guégan e Rousier, 1989) highlighted the centrality of the intangible factors, peculiar to some territories, adding to the traditional production factors. The concept of "territorial capital", that has become popular both among policy makers (European Commission, 2005) and scholars (Camagni, 2008; Capello et al., 2010), embodies these theories and suggests an innovative framework of analysis and measure of the assets that make a region attractive and competitive. In the Italian social and economic context, characterized by its regional specificities and excellences, it is particularly important to leverage these assets to boost the economy both at local and national level. In this paper, the authors provide a measure of the main components of territorial capital in the Italian regions, so as to provide a useful means for designing effective public development policies, which are now required to take territorial differences into major account. The possible structural effects of the last economic crisis on the regional endowment of territorial capital are also investigated. Taking the main dimensions of territorial capital (productive, cognitive, social, relational, environmental, settlement and infrastructural assets) identified by Camagni and Dotti (2010) as a starting point, several synthetic indexes are built, that measure those assets for all Italian regions. The impact of economic crisis on these dimensions is evaluated thanks to a dynamic analysis of the synthetic indexes, covering the period between 1995 and 2009. The main elements of discontinuity are also highlighted. This analysis has two main goals: on the one hand, to show a coincident and clear picture of the potential of Italian regions in terms of territorial capital in a comparative framework; on the other hand, the recent developments of Italian regions are described with respect to the structural effects of economic crisis on their territorial capital.

This book concerns EU Cohesion Policy and the economic convergence of underdeveloped regions in Italy and Spain from the first programming period to the present: it investigates the political and institutional factors that determine the success or failure of implementing EU Cohesion Policy at national and sub-national level, as well as their impact on economic growth. On the wave of the American tradition of development studies, this book suggests that public policy analysis can be fruitful for understanding economic growth and cohesion, if it were to reconstruct domestic public interventions for development and the institutional characteristics of the subjects responsible for pursuing development goals. To do so, this book derives its theoretical foundations from the traditional debate on the role of state actors in promoting economic development and on the institutional characteristics that the public authorities involved in the process of economic development should display. More precisely, by adopting an Hirschmanian approach to development, it elaborates an original framework to compare different Cohesion Policy implementations and to understand its economic results in different countries, using Italy and Spain as pilot studies.

Italy's econmic development has been characterised by marked regional disparities, most notably between the Centre-North and the South. Today, Italy demonstrates one of the widest geographical dualisms among OECD Member countries. In the Southern regions, the unemployment rate is still four times higher than in the Centre-North despite recent signs of dynamism. The infrastructure endowment of the South remains far below the national average and organised crime still constitues a heavy deterrent both for investment and endogenous development. The country has recently started relevant and promising transformations of its territorial governance aimed at creating those framework conditions that could favour local economic development in depressed areas. New instruments have been developed for the Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) which involve all actors and all tiers of government, in the strategic phases of design, implementation and evaluation of territorial policies. The review describes these policy innovatoins and discusses the major challenges that the country must tackle in order to reach a more balanced territorial development and lay the foundations of a new convergence process.The Territorial Review on Italy is integrated in a wider programme of National and Regional Territorial Reviews undertaken by the OECD Territorial Development Policy Committee. The overall aim of the territorial review series is to provide practical policy advice to governments.

Smart Evaluation and Integrated Design in Regional Development puts forward an alternative approach to evaluation in spatial planning - one that focuses on ’territory’ and ’landscape’. The book introduces an innovative evaluation approach, namely Territorial Integrated Evaluation (TIE), a meta-evaluation methodology for designing regional development scenarios. A research team from the Politecnico di Torino applied this methodology experimentally to the practices of spatial planning in Trentino in order to aid the Province in a process of institutional innovation that is still going on today. TIE defines territorial scenarios serving the need for regional economic development as well as the conservation of nature and landscape. A cross-border region, Trentino has a special need to harmonize economic development with the exceptional and internationally renowned value of its landscape which includes the Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Therefore TIE set out to design regional development scenarios that integrated various topics - retail, tourism, infrastructures, nature and landscape. By testing out TIE in practice in this extraordinarily dynamic institutional context, the book makes a significant contribution to the discussion about newly emerging approaches to spatial planning that involve multidisciplinary vision, new paradigms in regional development, and institutional learning and capability in decision-making.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. This book brings together academics, members of European institutions, and regional and national level policymakers in order to assess the performance and direction of EU Cohesion policy against the background of the most significant reforms to the policy in a generation. Responding to past criticisms of the effectiveness of the policy, the policy changes introduced in 2013 have aligned European Structural and Investment Funds with the Europe 2020 strategy and introduced measures to improve strategic coherence, performance and integrated development. EU Cohesion Policy: Reassessing performance and direction argues that policy can only be successfully developed and implemented if there is input from both academics and practitioners. The chapters in the book address four important issues: the effectiveness and impact of Cohesion policy at European, national and regional levels; the contribution of Cohesion policy to the Europe 2020 strategy of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth; the importance of quality of government and administrative capacity for the effective management of the Funds; and the inter-relationships between institutions, territory and place-based policies. The volume will be an invaluable resource to students, academics and policymakers across economics, regional studies, European studies and international relations.