In recent years, the European Union has increasingly supported the formation of non-standard regions that go beyond the traditional administratively-bound areas, with various degree of formality and competences. EU-led instruments have favoured the activation of different multi-level governance processes for functional territories through specific schemes of allocation of resources and by enabling new power and governance relationships mostly under the flag of European territorial cooperation. These instruments are characterised by new policy spaces whose construction is inspired by (a mix of) ideological perceptions of economic space, functional identification of socio-ecological features, and/or cultural construction of spatially-bounded identities and relationships. They generate newly emerging polities who have regional development, territorial cohesiveness and spatial justice as a policy aim. These re-territorialized polities host a wide variety of actors and policy communities pursuing thematic or political objectives. Their spatial metabolism consists of social, political, and economic channels through which development strategies and policies are implemented.
The scientific state of the art about these types of instruments is usually limited to a mono-dimensional analytical approach dedicated to the policy analysis, while a reflection on the overarching institutional complexity is less obvious. If the relationships between the instruments and the socio-institutional dynamics in the (new) regions appeared under-investigated, it is convincement of this project that the understanding of the complexity of territorial instruments application in different contexts is crucial to evaluate the variety of results.
To fill this gap, the research project REGAIN (REGionalism and INstututional dynamics in the EU) sets up an interdisciplinary research program to investigate a variety of territorialised processes that better match the socio-ambitions of existent territories. In particular, the research project is interested at investigating the characteristics of the EU instrument named Community-Led Local Development (CLLD), because of its innovative characters and the specific features that make it almost the unique instrument that addresses urban and sub-regional areas in an integrated fashion with a large involvement of local actors.
The project is located at the crossing of two main debates: the role of the EU and its territorial approach to local and territorial development; and the compelling discussion about the impoverishment of the territories that are characterised by small and medium-sized towns and rural areas, which have been outside the main political attention in the last decades, with severe consequences across the EU.
The CLLD instrument is built on the former LEADER-instrument experience, and in the current EU programming period, it has generated more than 3000 Local Action Groups (LAG) in charge of a local development strategy across Europe. Addressing the remarkable extension of this approach, the REGAIN project aimed on the one hand at investigating the multi-level governance and institutional process that frame the local implementation in various contexts, and on the other hand at better understanding the effectiveness of these initiatives and the capacity to support bottom-up approaches in local development strategy in the involved places. It looked at the definition of the area of intervention, the territorial strategy, the bottom-up dynamics and the establishment of a partnership with local enterprises and community representatives in the ad-hoc governing body.
