The process dimension of smart specialisation: social and political challenges to the regional decision-making in Europe

Smart specialisation strategies are a key element of the reformed 2014-2020 EU Cohesion Policy, both because of the novelty of their approach and because of being the object of an ex-ante conditionality. The development of smart specialisation strategies is not a voluntary bottom-up practice but a coercive requirement that the European Commission introduced and imposed on all Member States and regions to make innovation policies more effective over the on-going programming period, thus emerging as an agenda for innovating innovation policies, and more precisely processes. The thesis questions how smart specialisation's transformational ambitions are implemented in the world of policy practice by proposing a policy learning based approach to investigate the ongoing deployment of the new agenda. Through a qualitative field analysis conducted in two case study regions, Apulia and Sicily (IT), the research discusses the extent to which the new approach is able to trigger a collective learning process and a durable change of strategy-making processes in EU regions, and if so, under what conditions. The main assumption is that in order to be successfully designed and implemented, RIS3 require the presence of policy learning at all the different levels i.e. within the public sector, at the regional innovation system level and between different systems horizontally and vertically, and throughout all phases of the policy cycle, from design to implementation and evaluation. The main evidence and recommendations are discussed from an international perspective by comparing how the new agenda is absorbed and operationalized in different EU settings.