Lynette Germes (p), Carina Wiekens

The number of local energy initiatives in the Netherlands is rising. The so called ‘Buurkrachtbuurten’ are contributing to this growth. ‘Buurkracht’ is a non-profit organisation aiming to support neighbourhoods in their attempts to reduce energy consumption. Their goal is save as much energy as possible and, in the process, to contribute to social cohesion within local communities. An intervention to increase awareness of energy consumption and to increase social cohesion was tested in four villages in the northern part of the Netherlands (the province of Drenthe). The aim of this study was to help people to take their first step in the larger energy transition. Participants (N=75) measured their energy use with energy power meters and shared the results with their neighbours and with the researchers. Through “within-subject comparisons” (of different appliances within homes) and “between-subject comparisons” (of similar appliances within the neighbourhood), participants gained insight in their energy consumption. Furthermore, results showed that after this intervention (“Find the Energy Guzzler”), some participants acted according their insights, e.g. replaced some appliances. The evaluation of the intervention was very positive and participants would recommend this intervention to other people. Also, one of the experienced benefits of participation was that it increased contact with the neighbours. Other strengths and improvements are discussed as well in the paper.

Guilherme Oliveira (p), Guilherme Mendes Resende, Diego Firmino Costa da Silva

The Brazilian Constitutional Finance Funds (CFF) was created in 1988 to reduce regional inequalities. With subsidized interest rates, in the last decade these funds corresponded to billions of euros in loans with the objective of generating more employment and income in companies and, consequently, promoting economic development in less favored macro regions - North, Northeast and Central West.

In this sense, many studies in the last years have tried to analyze the repercussion that this policy of financing would have on the economic indicators, although, the majority of the works have as observational units the geographical aggregates, be these municipalities or microregions. We first attempt to analyze a poor explored issue in the literature, the existence of differentiated effects at the firm level having as control their characteristics. Propensity Score Matching (PSM) will be used to compare the effectiveness of the program in stimulating firms to create new jobs and to increase their productivity.

The credit obtained through CFF is a continuous variable that presents heterogeneous effects on variables linked to productivity - such as salary - and the use of labor input - as the number of employees - according to the amount borrowed (dose effect of loans). The challenge is to compare companies with sufficiently similar characteristics, but with different intensities of treatment, in order to construct a quasi-experiment scenario. In this sense, our second objective is to use Generalized Propensity Score (GPS) method, developed by Imbens (2000) and Hirano and Imbens (2004), to estimate the dose effect of loans.

In sum, this study aims to investigate the micro effects of CFF for the period between 2000 and 2012, verifying the heterogeneous effects of the treatment, in addition to the average effects, usual in the previous studies. The answers to these questions help to measure their impact on each level of lending taken on employability and productivity of participating companies. Thus, the study of CFF’s case may help to better interpret the results obtained for another regional funds in the world.

Using the register of social information filled out by Brazilian formal companies, the preliminary results present evidences of positive and statistically significant effect of the CFF on employment and wage growth at the firm level. Moreover, the dose response results indicate that loans values affect wages and employment. These evidences suggest new heterogeneous patterns in the program effect and complement the results previously reported in the literature.

Angela Colucci, Giulia Pesaro (p)

The project of the Observatory of Resilience Practices (ORP) was officially launched in April 2015. ORP was promoted by a partnership between Academic institutions (DAStU-Politecnico di Milano with DIST -Politecnico di Torino and University of Molise), the REsilienceLAB association and funded by Fondazione Cariplo (private bank foundation). The Observatory toverall strategic objective is to become a sharing “place” and a toolbox itself for the capacity building of local actors to enhance territorial resilience.
The essay introduces the ORP experience, which, in these two years, based on a strong interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, proved to be successful and able to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the resilience implementation from the operational perspective and to envisage innovative tools to be applied in a new generation of multipurpose projects.
The working axes of the Observatory of Resilience Practices are:
• Mapping resilience practices at national level: understanding endogenous and exogenous factors that may influence initiatives and interpretations of the panorama of the resilience practices.
• Tools for resilience: develop theoretical and methodological advancements based on the results from applied research developed at local community level. Expected results and products are: guidelines, learning and capacity building instruments, toolboxes promoting and supporting resilience initiatives.
• Resilience thinking: develop conceptual instruments for the dissemination of resilience approaches. The multiplicity of resilience definitions and approaches will be highlighted and tackled based on practices rather than on theories.
• Actors of resilience: develop the networking of national actors that, differentiated by their nature, competencies and interests, can play a key role in the implementation of innovative governance alliances.

The Observatory collected more than 130 resilience practices: 36 financed projects (actually in implementation phase) by the “Resilient communities” calls for projects launched by Fondazione Cariplo (from 2014); more than 60 bottom-up practices from national context, 30 applied researches and didactical process developing solutions and strategies towards territorial resilience. In the first part, the paper will present the panorama and the first comparison results focusing on tools and methodological aspects related to the governance of process.

The second part of the paper will focus on the main issues that emerged as fundamentals to guarantee the feasibility and the success of implementation, stabilization and diffusion of practices. The key aspects that will be discussed are:
1) the governance of the resilience practices processes;
2) new models for knowledge, co-production and capacity building
3) different perspectives in the economic approaches.

Valentina Aiello, Cristina Brasili (p)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential relation between institutional quality and social capital (SC) in several European Union (EU) regions. The focus here is on the regions, which we argue to be the most suitable territorial unit of analysis in light of the high degree of within-country variation shown by the two phenomena.
Our research contributes to the multiple SC dimensions differentiation. Since each dimension affects and is at the same time affected by the institutional quality, we use regional data from the European Values Study (EVS, 2008) and the European Social Survey (ESS, 2010), to detect six SC dimensions: general trust, institutional trust, formal networks, informal networks, civic participation and interest in politics.
Several SC scholars have shown, in recent years, how institutional quality is a crucial determinant for the performances in the EU funds absorption by EU regions. The core assumption of our work is that both institutional quality and SC affects and are at the same time affected by Cohesion Policy.
The state of the art shows that the relation between SC and institutional quality has been analyzed adopting different approaches. The society centered approach (Boix and Posner, 1996, 1998) argues that the SC is historically and culturally determined within a territory and that it affects directly the institutional quality.
The institutional approach (Rothstein and Stolle, 2003, 2007) instead, argues the opposite: either the presence or the absence of corruption but also the impartiality of institutions, affect the SC.
Finally, Paxton (2002) and Newton (2006) use a mixed approach which argues that SC, political performance and policy support are all strictly connected.
Our aim is to disentangle the relations among SC, EU member states performances with regard to structural funds spending and the quality of institutions at a regional level. The empirical approach makes use of new indices for different SC’s dimensions and the newly developed European Quality of Government Index (Charron et al., 2013), while at the same time controlling for others factors such as GDP pc, population and unemployment.
The analysis shows that SC and institutional quality are multifaceted phenomenon and it’s impossible to understand their relationship assuming a monolithic point of view.
Moreover, through the correlations and regression analysis, we analyse the existence of different SC dimensions each of them interacting differently with both the institutional quality and the capacity of funds absorption in the different EU regions under observations.