A conceptual device for spreading (good) territorial governance in Europe

Is it possible to spread good territorial governance in Europe and, if so, in which ways can such aim be achieved? This paper presents a conceptual device, developed within the ESPON project TANGO (Territorial Approaches for New Governance), usable to manage the spread of examples or “features” of good territorial governance in Europe. It is worth clarifying that this paper does not face the issues of defining what is “good” in territorial governance, nor of what can or should be transferred in this complex domain; problems thatthe aforementioned research project has also met. It focuses rather on modalities of transfer, particularly on “paths and means” through which (good) territorial governance might pass from one place to another or others, and on their major strengths and weaknesses. In order to achieve this aim vis-à-vis the well-known complexities of policy transfer (see, amongst others: Dolowitz & Marsh 1996, 2000; James & Lodge 2003), the proposed framework builds on the authors’ previous reflections about Europeanization of territorial governance (Cotella & Janin Rivolin 2010). This approach welcomes the assumption that, for institutional matters, policy transfer in the European Union (EU) and Europeanization are arguably two sides of the same coin (Wishlade et al. 2003).The EU is indeed an institutional context in which «the apparatus of policy diffusion and development has transnationalised in such a profound and irreversible way as to render anachronistic the notion of independent, “domestic” decision-making» (Peck 2011: 774). The institutional nature of territorial governance and of its changing is thus a fixed point of the proposed conceptual device: therefore, whereas potentially generalisable and adaptable to other institutional contexts, its application is here tailored on the EU’s context.