S3 and Recovery and Resilience Funds: A Case Study Built on the Experience of 10 Spanish Regions

The EU's response to the COVID-19 crisis, namely the approval of the Next Generation package, provides an opportunity to explore to what extent the existing Smart Specialisation regional strategies and related ecosystems have been taken into account in the highly relevant territorial context in which the national Recovery Plans have been designed. According to our results the potential of the Smart Specialisation approach (S3) in relation with its place-based strategic prioritisation may have been overlooked in the process. The research is based on a desk review of relevant documents and recent literature in this field; followed by semi-structured interviews with regional planners and practitioners from 10 Spanish regions (autonomous communities); complemented, in a second phase, by the organisation of a focus group to validate the initial results. During our research we identified the main contributions that the Smart Specialisation approach has so far made to the regions (mainly in terms of participative governance and creation of regional ecosystems); and the unanimous perception shared by all the practitioners interviewed that the S3 approach has led to a change of vision in public intervention. However, all of the interviewed regions have confirmed that the drafting of the national recovery and resilience plan lacked an ex-ante alignment with the regional S3 strategies, and failed to consider the existing regional S3 ecosystems. The separation of the recovery logic (based on the operation of public consultations at national level to identify strategic projects) from the S3 logic (based on a strategic prioritisation exercise conducted by each regional ecosystem) confirms that an opportunity may have been missed in the recovery planning process to consolidate the multi-actor, multilevel and place-based S3 approach. Although there is a certain degree of disappointment among regional practitioners as a result of this misalignment, the majority of them believe in the possibility of an ex-post alignment between the two processes, that can protect existing regional shared visions. However, without clear recognition of the S3 ecosystems and the S3 managing bodies, the significant role that Smart Specialisation could play in the recovery process may be at risk.