Over the past 20 years, a new approach to territorial development, based on the principles of interinstitutional cooperation and partnership among public and private actors, has progressively emerged in most European countries, and particularly in Italy. In the face of the failure of traditional top-down policies and increasingly pressing and complex public problems, the need to find new instruments and new regulation modes able to mobilize, coordinate and integrate territorial economic, social and cultural resources, has become urgent. Since the 1988 reform of Structural Funds, partnership has become one of the cornerstones of the European regional policy and the guiding principle of numerous national policies. This has entailed, besides the frequent evocation of a “new orthodoxy of partnerships” in political and academic debates, the diffusion of a growing number of practices of policy production on the part of public and private actors, which are, at least apparently, inspired by the ideals of dialogue and cooperation.

The goal of this section is to provide some useful information for the theoretical and empirical study of local partnerships. For this purpose, we will propose a thematic bibliography of the new modes of partnership governance, a review of the main partnership policies activated in Italy, and the final report of a research on local partnerships in the Province of Turin and Milan, carried out by URGE researchers, in collaboration with the centre POLEIS of Bocconi University, in the framework of the Integrated Project on New Modes of Governance (NEWGOV), funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union and co-ordinated by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute.




Thematic bibliography

Partnership policies for local development in Italy

NEWGOV research report:
Local Partnership Consolidation in Italy. Analytical framework, research strategy and case selection

It is also possible to download the URGE Working Paper 3/2007:
L'istituzionalizzazione dei partenariati per lo sviluppo locale. Il caso dei Patti territoriali della Provincia di Torino, by P. Vesan and V. Sparano

   
Contacts:
Valeria Sparano: valeria.sparano_at_urge.it 
Patrik Vesan: patrik.vesan_at_urge.it