ABSTRACT
A casual scan of European regions suggests that the notion of “regional strategy” has become significantly more popular in recent years. Much of that has been driven by demands (and financial support) from the European level. The European Commission has encouraged the development of regional innovation strategies (European Commission, 2007; Ortega-Argilés, 2012), and has now made smart specialization strategies a necessary condition for regions to be eligible for structural funds (European Commission, 2013a). Outside of Europe, too, some scholars have written about the ‘advent of strategic management of places’ (Audretsch, 2006). In practice, territorial strategies are often predominantly planning documents with a medium- to long-term view, designed to provide orientation for the annual activity plans and budgets governments regularly put forward. This chapter will focus on the content of these strategies, what the editors of this book call the “what” (Navarro et al., 2014). Other parts of this book focus instead on the “how” and the “who,” discussing the process and the involvement of different stakeholders.
