Approach to Lisbon strategy for a sustainable territorial development: the case study of Province of Rome

The cross-thematic ESPON 3.3 project (2004-2006), named Territorial dimension of the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy, was oriented and developed to obtain several goals: - to apply the update Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy at territorial dimension, for developing them by new Structural Funds 2007-2013; - to conduce ex ante analysis of the impacts of these strategies in order to develop the EU national and regional competitiveness in a sustainable way; - to introduce territorial cohesion to the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy, indicating ways of integrating the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy in Structural Funds interventions in support of a balanced and cohesive territorial development of the enlarged EU. - to link national (macro), regional (meso) and sub-regional (micro) territorial dimension; - to measure the territorial capability to apply the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy at national, regional, sub-regional levels; For this and as added value of the project, a simply-user operational procedure to handle the project results (GIS) was developed. The main results were obtained studing several traditional and additional indicators, identified and measured to achieve the final indicators useful to monitor the “spatial” and “territorial” Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy. The project recommends to take into account at political level this final list (thereafter A-case) to have got a common European regional measure of the territorial capability of applying Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy. A ‘process’ (SteM Approach, which produces Territorial Impact Assessment – TIA as well as Strategic Environmental Assessment - SEA) was developed too. It can be used to assess the current and future national, regional, sub-regional capability to be competitive in sustainability. The final project proposal was to study four great “determinants” or composite indicators . They were arisen from simple indicators (metadata) included into both revisited and renovated Lisbon Agenda, and the implementation of Gothenburg Strategy (Almunia Document, 2005 and the relative Eurostat update 2005-2006). They are: • Innovation & Research (including ICT, R&D, Innovation, Human capital, Age) • Global/local interaction (including CT, R&D, Innovation, SMEs, Human capital, Employment, Transport) • Quality (including SMEs, Human capital, Employment, Climate, Public health, Natural resources, Poverty, Transport, Age) • Use of resources and funds (including ICT, Innovation, Employment, Human capital, Age, Climate, Public health, Natural resources, Poverty); Territorial cohesion was also introduced to indicate ways of integrating the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy into the new Structural Funds. The project start-up could already count on some commonly shared results (see in Table 2): i) a list of 42 indicators, which are subject to revision every three years; ii) a reduced/short list of 14 indicators (from EU Spring Report, 2004) proposed to arrange a more easily constructible European governance model (2001), based on common statistical indicators reflecting the Lisbon/Gothenburg goals, looking at the social and economic objectives and at the geographical scale of NUTS 1, 2 e 3; iii) in following (March 2005), the Almunia list of 15 indicators. Anyway, a new indicators appropriate selection (in the overall 69, see Table 2) appeared useful in order to: - provide a common basic analysis of European regional results obtained from 2000 to 2004 for supporting and explaining political choices for the period from 2007 to 2013; - suggest some possible integrations with regard to the real and complex differences within and between the old and new EU regions for the full use of the revisited Structural Funds. The TPG point of view in front of 3.3 project scopes was mainly oriented from: - a critical discussion in front of some scientific and institutional inputs, as e.g. the Kok Final Report, Facing the Challenge. The Lisbon Strategy for growth and employment (November, 2004); - the full sharing of others, as: • the study Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives by the European Parliament's Committee on regional development (provisional version, January, 2005); • the Communication from Mr. Almunia (March, 2005) to the Commission Sustainable Development Indicators to monitor the implementation of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy”; They demonstrate why the initial Lisbon proposal based on the 14 synthetic indicators list (2003-2004) should not be suitable. To better sustain this “ambitious” thesis, 3.3 TPG decided to make at the same time two complementary analysis and mapping activities to perform a comparison: • The first (A) related to the new methodology for the four composite indicators or determinants • The second (B) based on the short-list of indicators (the 14 “Spring Report” indicators) In this way, the 3.3 project has offered a concrete and operational answer about how the EU countries (25+2+2 at NUTs 0), regions (NUTs 2), sub-regional areas (NUTs 3) can achieve the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy and territorial cohesion using their regional potentials; and as the regional areas are, which may best benefit from the granting of a co-operative use of the new Structural Funds. The project met these requirements by territorialisation of spatial (statistical) data and building a proposal of cross-thematic co-operative regions, identifying their potentialities in the light of Lisbon/Gothenburg, through ‘bottom-up’ research of the regional and sub-regional qualitative and quantitative values. In order to develop a common co-operative territorial milieu through the use of new Structural Funds, the project proposed an integration of the indicators list with regard to the different territorial dimensions (regional typologies and trans-national areas involved in Interreg III B programmes and projects). In order to 3.3 project results, the territorialized ones at regional and sub-regional level (at NUTs 2 and 3) from “STeM Approach” and has proposed-built an original base for this territorialisation of the spatial data (statistical data) combining the ESPON Programme typologies (see in following Figs 24 and 25). A more selective and “customised” set of policy recommendations was presented together with scenarios towards the implementation of the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy, concerning the different capabilities shown by the territories and their aggregated hypotheses on a co-operative base, to confirm the initial key-message, suggesting general and sectorial policies. By using the STeM Approach and EU TIA input 2005, 3.3 project has detected: i) the national and regional territorial status. It corresponds also at ex ante potential demand for supplying national and regional appropriate operative plans; ii) the wished effects applying Lisbon/Gothenburg sectorial policies by Structural Funds; iii) the ex post simulation of national and regional changing. This approach was useful “to assess the development potential and territorial imbalance in different trans-national/national territories and types of regions in relation to the objective of Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy”. The 3.3 project named this development potential capability to be competitive in sustainability. For this scope, the specific GIS assessment was built, too, as added value of the 3.3. project. A successful implementation of the Lisbon-Gothenburg strategies depends on differentiated interventions at the macro, meso and micro levels and policy recommendations were proposed accordingly. In addition, the methodology developed in this project has pioneered an approach in which the potential impact of such interventions are assessed in relation to the specificities of each particular region, as opposed simply to the ‘type’ of region. Thus within this revisited Report, recommendations were also differentiated according to the specificity of regions. The summary of the key recommendations arising from 3.3 project accounted of: - the conclusions of a survey of the entire ESPON programme which identified implicit recommendations related to the delivery of Lisbon-Gothenburg; - a charting of ‘Lisbon and Gothenburg derived policy objectives’ set in relation to the composite indicators within 3.3 project.