Csaba Lakócai (p)

In France, the latest financial crisis gave boost to the creation of local currencies - a form of socioeconomic innovation and direct local scale response to the failure of the formal financial and monetary systems. The first scheme of the country-wide local complementary and community currency network (in French "le réseau des monnaies locales complémentaires citoyennes", or "réseau des MLCC"), was put into circulation in 2008. Currently, there are more than sixty existing projects (some further currencies exist beyond the network too) and more than seventy future projects will be implemented in the upcoming years. These numbers are remarkable, however the process of creation and implementation is not spatially even. The statistical overview and spatial presentation of the local currency schemes have been mainly omitted by the relevant literature so far. In the presentation, I deal with the spatial features of the territorial distribution of the local currencies in France in a NUTS-3 regional breakdown by applying descriptive statistics and regression analyses.
The results are based on our joint research with Jérôme Blanc, full professor in Economics at Sciences Po Lyon.

Hiroaki Shirayanagi (p), Yukisada Kitamura , Ryo Hirako

In recent years, frequent extreme weather conditions have led to enormous economic and social loss all over the world. In Japan, the river-flooded area accounts for only 10% of the land, but 50% of Japan’s population lives on such land and the assets in this area account for 75% of Japan’s assets. Therefore, the damage caused by torrential rain and typhoons is very extensive in terms of humans and assets. To help reduce these damages, flood countermeasures such as widening the river channel have been implemented, but as the population decreases and infrastructure renewal efforts become concentrated, these conventional flood countermeasures will be more difficult to implement in the future.
In this study, we suggest a new flood insurance system by combining flood countermeasures as a risk control method and flood insurance as a risk finance method, based on the current situation and problems surrounding flood disaster risk management in Japan.
In this system, a portion of the flood control project costs is covered by insurance product sales, so people who have losses due to flood damage are able to receive flood insurance payments if unanticipated flood damage is suffered. At the same time, inhabitants in disaster areas will benefit from damage relief implemented through the flood control project. Finally, this system is expected to reinforce resilience from flood damage in a flood disaster area.
As an example, we calculated the flood insurance fee based on the condition that 20% of the insurance product sales are assigned to the flood control project and all households purchase insurance that expires in 100 years, to target the flood damage caused by heavy torrential rains that occurred in some areas of Neyagawa City in Osaka prefecture. This insurance fee per household was calculated to be approximately 20,000 yen (160 EUR) per year. We also show that the total value of insurance products will rise even if the insurance fee increases, because it is possible to promote disaster prevention and reduction by allocating funds to the flood control project.

Letizia Donati (p), Marco Bellandi

This paper, after a review of the Local Social Innovation (LSI) concept, proposes to use the quadruple helix (QH) framework of interactions between universities, government, companies and civil society (Carayannis & Campbell, 2009) to understand and manage LSI, and aims at assessing, through a case study based on secondary data, the implementation of SI policies driven by QH mechanism in Europe.
The SI is far from being a well-established concept (Pol & Ville, 2009), however it is possible to claim that scholars agree on its contextual and local nature (Moulaert, 2009; Moulaert et Al., 2013).
The theoretical foundation of LSI has to be found in the social basement of the community of people living in a certain place. LSI is focused on the transformation of social relations which are naturally embedded in local systems and territories (Oosterlynck et Al., 2013). Local socially innovative practices may emerge as result of both the engagement and the empowerment process of different actors at local level (Sharra & Nyssen, 2010) and they can be sustained by new technologies developed by firms (Mulgan et Al., 2007), new forms of public governance (Moulaert et Al., 2005) and supported by knowledge produced by research institutions (Benneworth & Cunha, 2015).Therefore, it is proposed here to adopt a QH perspective both to understand and to guide such process.
In this regard, the growing interest of policy makers in SI (EU, 2013) has led to the design of the Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) which is a novelty among EU schemes of structural funds. It requests projects to be submitted by quadruple helix partnerships and led by municipalities; in fact, the UIA aims at sustaining cities to tackle innovative solutions to achieve sustainable and inclusive development goals related to urban poverty, housing, integration of migrants and refugees.
After an in-depth analysis of two projects based in different Italians cities (Bologna-North and Pozzuoli-South) it is possible to claim that local SI can be exactly identified in the activation of new and successful relations among subjects pertaining to quadruple helix configurations (Bologna); however, barriers playing against such collaborations may arise (Bellandi et Al., 2018) due to different organization’s objectives (Pozzuoli). When implementing quadruple helix policies for local SI thus, local governments need to adopt an experimentalist governance (Sabel & Zeitlin, 2012) supported by evidence-based approaches, profiling of QH actors’ constellations, and adequate participatory methodologies (Hamlyn et al., 2015).