ABSTRACT
Something unusual is happening when high-ranking politicians take time and trouble to launch a modest regional development programme which brings in very little money and offers no immediate political reward. Yet this is precisely what has happened in Wales (UK), Norte (Portugütilla y León (Spain) and many other regions of the European Union (EU) in recent years. The occasion for these unusual events, with which national politicians were keen to be associated, was the official launch of a new EU policy for lessfavoured regions called the Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) programme. That these politicians involved themselves was due in large part to the fact that the European Commission had presented the RIS programme as an opportunity for a few regions to act as ‘laboratories’ for a new generation of regional policy and a chance, perhaps, for them to engage with the future before it arrived. In other words, there was a certain cachet attached to the exercise which compensated for the lack of traditional payoffs.
