Folke Snickars (p)

In my university study, I started to search for the research element in the text of regional plans in the period 1952-2002 as it was reflected in the regional plans. Hardly a sign. I looked for universities as the elements treated in the regional plans. Not a sentence. Even in the famous 1966 sketch of a regional plan for the Stockholm region universities were seen as a part of the public services sector for which a location in the semi-central band was proposed. Instead, large segments of the text were spent on locational aspects of the retail sector and the banking sector.

Location issues as the move of Stockholm University from downtown Stockholm to Frescati in the semi-central band were praised. So was the shift in responsibility from the City of Stockholm to the national level. In the national level documents the relocation was a matter of land availability and costs.

Looking at the subsequent regional plans it was only in the 2015 regional development plan for the Stockholm region that the question of universities as elements of the regional infrastructure was dealt with, and, in a minor way. And this is in a context when the three elements of sustainable development, economic, social and environmental had been around since the late 1980s. There is a simple exception to this lack of insight of what are the most strategic parts of a regional development strategy. This is the book “Universities – the future of regions” written by Åke E Andersson, Björn Hårsman and Jan Linzie on commission from Bo Wijkmark in his capacity as the director of the Stockholm Office of Regional Planning and Urban Transportation.

The national government has continued to regard the location of Södertörn University College as a question of primary concern to the Stockholm region and not for the country as a whole. This is ever more surprising as the establishment of regional universities seems to be regarded as the most successful regional policy not only in Sweden but across Europe. Apparently, this observation does not seem to hold for the intraregional level not even in a region which has a population increase of 40000 persons on average.

These considerations have provided the inspiration to further develop the question of the relation between universities and regional development.

Ioannis Saratsis (p), Manolis Koutoulakis

One of the innovative characteristics of the 2014-2020 programming period is the adoption by the Commission of the so called territorial instruments, to cope with the territorial dimension of the development problems. These instruments are implemented by two different types of projects, namely the Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) and the Community Led Local Development (CLLD). Both types of projects are an extension of the LEADER type of intervention in which an area is considered as the implementation area and multiple actions are funded in order to have a more integrated outcome.
For the proper implementation of the territorial instruments, each Operational Program (OP) under the Partnership Agreement (PA) of each Member State, had to analyze the way that these instruments are going to be implemented, what area they can be applied to, what kind of funding they need in order to be effective, who is going to be responsible for the implementation, what kind of projects can be funded and so on. Beside these general conditions described in the OP's there are some crucial aspects of the planning process of these ITI projects that are important to be discussed.
The main discussion of this paper is focused on the way that local stakeholders are incorporated in the planning process of the Integrated Territorial Investment projects in Greece. Actually, very little attention is given to the needs of local stakeholders by the Regional Authorities, who are responsible for the planning of the OP's. Instead, Regional Authorities are interested in having fewer problems during the implementation period, especially in regard to performance reserve indices.
The paper describes a planning process that includes more local actors and proposes a consultation methodology that can be applied in the designing of ITI projects with more focus on local needs

Artur Ochojski (p), Adam Polko

See extended abstract

Jan Oosterhaven (p)

This note argues that most academic key sector analyses provide misleading information for policy-makers, as they ignore the other side of the coin, namely, that the tax cost of generating a sector’s large forward and backward linkages is unequal across sectors and unequal across backward and forward linkages. Only the two net linkage measures make a first, be it minimal, attempt to incorporate this other side of the coin. Serious policy advice should equally be based on an adequate discussion of the other side of the coin.