Innovative Sustainable Economy (ISE) Mission participated in the first Institutional Dialogue organised by the Green Living Areas (GLA) Mission, gathering 50 stakeholders from across the Mediterranean and beyond. The event provided a great opportunity to discuss policy challenges and opportunities and their potential for replication for green living spaces in the Euro-Mediterranean region.
The first Institutional Dialogue of the EUCLID Working Community organised by the GLA Mission took place on the 10th of October 2024 in Brussels during the European Week of Regions and Cities. It served as a forum for policy-oriented Thematic Project Partners and key Euro-Mediterranean stakeholders to exchange concrete ways to implement, replicate, adapt and upscale public initiatives, strategies and policies at the local level. The event featured a wide range of Mission ISE stakeholders, with contributions both from the world of governance and thematic projects.
Building on the results of the first meeting of the Mission working groups held in June, the event shed a light on a selected group of proven successful policies was presented during the first Dialogue, bringing several cross-cutting themes such as innovation, finance and community engagement to the table.
The following policy instruments were selected and discussed:
- Transportation of goods – Sustainable Urban Logistics Plan (SULP), Bologna, Italy
- Spatial Planning – Superblocks Urban Planning Model, Barcelona, Spain
- Renewable energy and economic development – GR-eco Island Chalki, Chalki & DAFNI, Greece
- Environment and innovation – Public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI), Narni, Italy
The last selected experience is developed in the framework of the ISE Mission Thematic Transfer project Procuramed, whose objective is to promote the process of green innovative technology application in public services. The project, led by the Municipality of Narni, will develop tools, training and tailor-made advice for public authorities and companies, and will work to boost transnational cooperation between public procurers and private companies. Mr. Pietro Flori – Supervisor of the Department of Public Work, Municipality of Narni – provided a contribution on the role of public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI), which occurs when the public sector uses its purchasing power to act as an early adopter of innovative solutions that are not yet available on a large commercial scale. PPI provides a large enough demand to incentivise industry to invest in wide commercialisation to bring innovative solutions to the market with the quality and price needed for mass market deployment. This enables the public sector to modernise public services with better value for money solutions and provides growth opportunities for companies.
As mentioned above, the Mission also provided a contribution in the area of governance. Mr. Alessandro Daraio – Coordinator of the Institutional Dialogue Project for the Emilia-Romagna Region – also attended the event as representative of the ISE Mission. He took the opportunity to promote the cooperation already started in recent months between the Interreg Euro-MED Missions and encourage innovative and cross-sectoral policy-making. His contribution focused in particular on the potential role of place-based transformative innovation for green living spaces.
The Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) approach is at the heart of the ISE mission and could represent common ground between the two Missions. This new paradigm has emerged in recent years. It stems partly from reflection on the transition towards sustainability and partly from R&I policy. In this context, one of the first institutional publications on the subject was the Report of the European Environment Agency: Sustainability transitions: policy and practice (2019). Work in this direction has been promoted in the context of the 2030 Agenda and the European Green Deal, which are influencing EU Programmes. As a result, a significant literature has developed which increasingly emphasises the need to orient R&I policy in a way that contributes doubly to strengthening the EU’s sustainability and competitiveness by following 5 principles: transformation, directionality, co-creation, diffusion and uptake.
Transformative Innovation is based on the understanding that today’s societal challenges cannot be addressed by science and technology or public policy alone. On the contrary, tackling them calls for a transformation of the socio-technical systems involved and profound changes in dominant practices whose development is unsustainable and unfair. This has strong implications for policy making, as it requires systemic approaches to take a global view of the challenges and the desired future, and a common approach to plan and implement collective action.
Policy making should have a direction, set priorities and avoid being prescriptive on the way objectives are going to be fulfilled; in parallel, it should involve a wider range of stakeholders from the outset in order to shape this process. Last but not least knowledge, results and innovative solutions shall be promoted across society, territories and people. This is a common feature of the current systems which goes beyond sectoral policies and therefore unites the two Missions within the Interreg Euro-MED programme.
Mr. Daraio highlighted that the ISE mission can provide approaches and methodological tools to identify and understand complex challenges and design multi-stakeholder processes to address them. For this to happen, it is necessary to build capacity and disseminate knowledge, not only among ‘traditional’ R&D actors, but also and above all among all those involved in the debate on the challenges of moving towards more sustainable development. He also mentioned some opportunities offered by the ISE mission that might be suitable for GLA stakeholders, such as Innovation Camps and upcoming capacity building courses.
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