Multi-level Governance for Innovation

Regional innovation governance relates to all the processes of interactions among various actors that together determine the priorities, strategies, activities and outcomes in research and innovation at the regional level (read our policy brief on Regional Innovation Governance).

Regional innovation governance implies the adoption of institutional arrangements to favour systemic interactions among different innovation actors within the region with for instance the triple-helix model of innovation or between policy hierarchies with improving policy coordination through multi-level governance.

Multi-level innovation governance can be defined as a complex process of collaboration across different government levels (supranational, national, regional, local) and/or innovation promotion agents for territorial development strategies. Its aim of is opening up regional innovation strategies—such as the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3)—to other actors (in the production and knowledge systems) simultaneously at various scales (Larrea et al.).

It is thus important to introduce practices that foster collaboration and alignment between governance levels and territorial actors in the definition and development of S3 and other regional strategies to promote more effective multi-level governance.

The Partnerships for Regional Innovation (PRI) put an emphasis on developing more effective multi-level governance and fostering synergies between policies and between different funding instruments—such as the Cohesion Policy and Horizon Europe—while broadening stakeholder engagement and participatory governance. An interesting example comes from Belgium: in SMARTPILOTS, the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP) in Ghent, offers an example of how regions can find synergies between Cohesion Policy and Horizon Europe by making a research and innovation infrastructure attractive to SMEs and research actors alike. 

There are four main pillars when developing multi-level governance:

• Complexity (dealing with conflicts) 
• Emergence (learning through the process)
• Context specificity (different regional experiences)
• Reciprocity (recognising each other level of governance).

The Orkestra Basque Institute of Competitiveness shared six insights on multi-level governance:

• The urgency of developing multi-level governance,
• Its systemic nature (responding to complexity),
• The need for a new role for citizens in multi-level governance,
• The apparent dilemma between efficiency and democratisation,
• The importance of complementarities and collaboration in multi-level-governance,
• The hybrid nature of multi-level governance (responding to its emergent nature).

Multi-level innovation governance is an important topic for many Interreg Europe projects, among which: ECORIS3, aiming to foster policies and measures to support local and regional innovation ecosystems; RELOS3 which promotes the deployment of S3 at the local level; S34GROWTH that aims to enhance interregional collaboration through new industrial value chains; COHES3ION integrating a regional and sub-regional element into S3 and looking into how regions can develop their multi-level governance.

COHES3ION offers five policy recommendations to develop multi-level innovation governance, they are:

• To clarify, negotiate and agree the roles of participants in action plans,
• To create spaces for dialogue between regional and sub-regional policy agents,
• To create spaces for dialogue between regional and national policies,
• To empower policy agents to involve relevant S3 actors in their respective levels,
• To develop shared monitoring and evaluation tools.

Other Interreg Europe projects have also shared good practices to facilitate the development of multi-level innovation governance.