Multilevel Governance and Institutional Co-design: Democratic Innovation in the National Strategy for Inner Areas and the National Strategy for Sustainable Development

This proposal examines how emerging forms of multilevel participatory governance and institutional co-design can strengthen the capacity of public administrations to address complex territorial challenges, drawing on Bertelli’s (2021) framework of administrative democracy. In this perspective, democratic quality does not derive solely from electoral or deliberative procedures; it also depends on the ability of administrative institutions to embed meaningful participation and collaborative practices, translating citizen and stakeholder engagement into policy outputs that are both effective and democratically legitimate. Multilevel governance thus becomes a crucial testing ground. Territorial development and sustainability policies—marked by interdependencies among actors, levels of government and policy sectors—require new forms of “democratic administration” capable of integrating technical expertise, bottom-up deliberation and inter-institutional coordination. Here, institutional co-design goes beyond participatory consultation: it involves administrations themselves jointly redesigning procedures, tools and responsibilities, overcoming the traditional separation between policy design and implementation. The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) represents a paradigmatic example of such dynamics. Created to address marginalisation and territorial inequalities, SNAI introduced a governance model that combines: locally driven participatory planning; collaboration among municipalities within “project areas”; regional coordination and national strategic steering; integration across sectoral policies (healthcare, mobility, education, and local development). Within this framework, co-design becomes an institutionalised process: it engages local communities and stakeholders, while also creating arenas in which local, regional and national administrations negotiate objectives, solutions and resources. This joint decision-making produces administrative innovations that transform competencies, responsibilities, and policy instruments. The SNAI experience also highlights that effective participation requires distributed administrative capacity and strong coordination mechanisms. A second complementary case is the National Strategy for Sustainable Development (SNSvS), where the central challenge lies not only in co-designing policies but also in integrated sustainability monitoring. The strategy relies on shared reporting systems among national, regional and local authorities, harmonised indicators, public consultation processes and accountability tools that link global goals (Agenda 2030) with territorial policies. Integrated monitoring functions as an infrastructure of “democratic administration”: it enhances transparency, informs prioritisation, supports institutional learning and enables participation to shape policy revision. Examining SNAI and SNSvS together reveals how multilevel institutional innovations can strengthen legitimacy, policy effectiveness and the transformative capacity of public action. More broadly, these cases illustrate how administrative democracy increasingly unfolds within local and territorial governance, where participatory design, inter-institutional coordination and administrative capacity become mutually reinforcing. This contribution proposes that territorial strategies such as SNAI and SNSvS serve as valuable laboratories for understanding the conditions under which multilevel co-design processes generate democratic and administrative improvements. They also offer insights into how local governance can act as a driver of democratic renewal, providing models that may inspire broader reforms in contemporary public administration.