STeMA: a Sustainable Territorial economic/environmental Management Approach

The STeMA-TIA model has been devised to support an integrated strategic vision of general, territorialised and sectoral policies at all decision-making levels. This assessment tool was created within the context of spatial planning and as part of the territorial dimension of the European Strategies. STeMA-TIA is based on an original qualitative-quantitative methodological approach comprising 10 simplifying hypotheses and 9 logical steps. It develops along interactive coaxial matrices (indicators-policies-effects), which return ex ante and ex post results and maps. It was fruitfully applied to the Territorial Dimension within the Lisbon/Gothenburg Strategy, the Territorial Cohesion Policy, and National and Regional Operative Plans 2020, as well as to Italian structural reforms at the metropolitan and regional level. The strength of this tool lies in its flexibility and ability to combine different indicators related to economic, social, environmental, cultural, organisational and financial dimensions, which assess Territorial Impact Assessment in relation to original Systemic Territorial Functional Typologies. One existing weakness of STeMA-TIA is that, during a pairwise comparison process, identifying indicators such as ‘dominant’ and ‘secondary’ may not always be straightforward. Further developments and applications may help overcome this limitation. Future applications of STeMA-TIA include using it to measure Territorial Cohesion within green economy policies at the national-regional level or to evaluate the post-2020 Europe strategy, cultural heritage and tourist strategies via Innovative Technologies and within Smart Specialisation Strategy.