https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0322-0987
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ABSTRACT
Regional strategies, such as smart specialization strategies, can set the course for future diversification. Despite its importance, surprisingly little is known about how the underlying policy-making process affects the direction of regional strategies, i.e. the priority areas that regions aim to promote. As a consequence, the underlying reasons why certain regions have difficulties in developing adequate future-oriented strategies remain concealed. The purpose of this article is to provide a framework to unpack the policy-making process of regional strategy development and link it to the policy outcomes. The conceptual elaborations highlight that only by considering the features of this policy-making process, distributed across various actors with heterogenous interests and capabilities, can we explain why regions favour the promotion of certain types of path development over others.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Regional Studies Association for supporting this research through an RSA Early Career Grant.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This article focuses on the influence of the policy-making process on path development policies. The success of translating RIS3 into regional economic development impact is a critical topic, but beyond the scope of this article. Whether regional diversification strategies are successfully translated from policy into real regional economic dynamics depends on several factors and can face distinct challenges in different economy types. Here, especially the complexities of diversification as a regional development strategy in resource economies have been outlined (e.g. Breul and Atienza Citation2022).
2 The distinction into less-developed and advanced European regions is primarily based on regional innovation scoreboard rankings from 2016 and therefore largely reflects the quality of a region’s innovation system (see Trippl, Zukauskaite, and Healy Citation2020).
3 The framework has recently been applied in an empirical paper to a case study on the development of a regional transformation strategy in a German lignite mining region (Breul Citation2022). While the referred empirical study focuses on the empirical application without providing the required scope to fully develop and introduce the framework, the focus of the present paper is the development of the conceputal framework.