‘Smart Participation’ and Territorial Institutions: Partnership Opportunities in the EU’s New Cohesion Policy

Since the ratification of the Single European Act in1986 the evolution of the EU’s development policies has passed through two sequential and interconnected phases. The first began in 1989 with the launching of the Cohesion Policy and its endorsement of principles and objectives of territorially balanced growth, which fed into the second phase initiated in 2000 by the Lisbon Agenda and characterized by the incremental adoption of sustainable and smart growth principles and objectives. Through the two phases, civil society’s participation in policy formulation has been one of the principles which has grown in recognition. While European regions have shown different levels of performance in formulating and implementing Cohesion Policy funded programs, the four largest Southern Italian regions have systematically underperformed, relative to both sets of objectives: the reduction in the development gap and the pursuit of sustainable and smart growth through innovation. This paper takes a pro-active stance, focusing on the new opportunities for change in policy direction and performance that the current Europe 2020 cycle of Cohesion Policy affords the Southern regions. Importantly, the new Cohesion Policy does so by requiring effective partnerships between territorial institutions and elements in civil society. To this end, in the paper we introduce and dwell on the notion of ‘smart participation’, defined as the engagement of citizens as innovators by the territorial institutions in the formulation and implementation of priority programs. We then move to offer and discuss a taxonomy of ‘smart specialization’ partnerships, and close by summarizing the analysis of the Europe 2020 programmes of Southern regions and their smart participation choices of partnerships, together with the feedback received from the field work.