When regional innovation policies meet policy rationales and evidence: a plea for policy analysis

ABSTRACT

In spite of recent advancements regarding regional innovation policy rationales and evidence, there are few analyses about the actual features of existing regional innovation policies. Nevertheless, a policy analysis perspective is important in order to recognize their distinctive patterns across regions, and to understand how rationales and evidence can be translated into policy-making. To this purpose, this paper develops a framework to study the extent to which regional innovation policies have changed during the past few years. Since the mid-2000s, there has been an important development of innovation policy rationales, advocating for more specialization; likewise, greater data availability at the regional level has allowed more sophisticated assessment of innovation performance. Finally, the crisis since 2008 has had ravaging effects in some regions, with job losses and severe economic sluggishness. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect transforming dynamics in regional innovation policies. Against this backdrop, the paper compares the institutional frameworks and budgetary priorities of four Spanish regions during the period 2001–2014: Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia. In so doing, it aims at studying the extent to which regional governments have readily addressed past and new challenges related to their regional innovation system, and if so, how.

KEYWORDS:

• Catalonia
• Basque Country
• Galicia
• Andalusia
• regional innovation system
• smart specialization
• policy change
• regional advantage
• policy mixes
• policy instruments
• regulatory governance
• Spain

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Marc Fuster for his dedicated work as a research assistant in the preparation of this paper. We are also very grateful to James Wilson at Orkestra, and Manuel González-López at the University of Santiago de Compostela, for their generous time to give us substantial feed-back on earlier versions of this paper. Naturally, the authors are the sole responsible for any mistakes in this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.