Capacity Building for Democratic Innovation: Collaborative Governance and Local Action in Peripheral Lombardy

Collaborative governance has become a central feature of contemporary European local development policy, promoted as democratic innovations that embody a bottom-up, place-based approach aware of territorial characteristics and community needs (Barca et al., 2012; Pike et al., 2017). The European Union’s LEADER and Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) initiatives exemplify this paradigm. In peripheral and rural areas, these programmes require local authorities to design and implement development strategies through governance systems that bring together non-institutional actors such as third-sector organisations, citizens and local businesses. Such arrangements are expected to improve the responsiveness of policies to local needs and also to enhance democratic engagement, equity of voice and accountability (Emerson et al., 2012; Rodríguez-Pose & Wilkie, 2017). However, this participatory governance presupposes that actors possess, or can develop, the capabilities needed to co-design and sustain complex multi-actor processes over time (Emerson et al., 2012; Ansell & Torfing, 2015). Within this framework, the effectiveness of collaborative local development depends on the strength of capacities among all actors involved. In peripheral areas in Lombardy (Northern Italy) capacity building initiatives led by universities and institutional actors to support local stakeholders in articulating their needs and designing place-based development strategies have already occurred. This research investigates whether and how these initiatives have triggered changes in local actors and in the outcomes of collaborative governance processes, aiming to improve the overall quality and effectiveness of local development strategies. Therefore the research questions are: which processes are most relevant in capacity-building activities? Which mechanisms have they generated in terms of participation, learning and coordination? Is there systematic variation in outcomes across territories, and what contextual or institutional factors explain it? To address these questions, the study develops an ex ante Theory of Change (ToC) linking capacity-building activities to expected changes in local capacities, democratic practices and development outcomes. This ToC will be tested and refined through semi-structured interviews with both implementers and recipients of capacity-building initiatives in selected peripheral areas. On this basis, area-specific ToCs will be refined to capture the diversity of causal pathways and outcomes. In a second step, differences in outcomes and mechanisms across areas will be compared and classified in order to identify enabling and constraining factors for democratic innovation and problem-solving capacity at local level. The research contributes to debates on democratic governance in complex institutional settings since it provides empirically grounded insights into how capacity-building initiatives can (or fail to) enhance participation, specific capacities and problem-solving in collaborative governance. Secondly, it provides evidence about how these dynamics are shaped by the specific crisis-ridden context of Southern European peripheral areas.