ARGE-Alp: esperienze, limiti e prospettive di una "Comunità di lavoro" delle Alpi, di Alberto Bramanti e Remigio Ratti

ARGE-Alp: Experiences, drawbacks and outlooks of a ‘working community’ in the Alps

ABSTRACT

ARGE-Alp is a working community of 10 Alpine regions founded in 1972. The aims of the working community are to build bridges across borders in the Alpine region and to strengthen the understanding between areas within and outside of the Alpine area.
This paper starts with an analysis of the role of territories in supporting growth and an examination of the different forms of regional collaboration. It then turns to the history of the ARGE-Alp Working Community over the last decade (2006-2016) and its project portfolio, which includes 39 projects in the ecological, cultural, social and economic fields.Three major strengths of the ARGE-Alp experience are discussed in the paper : i) the matching between “soft contains” (i.e., many projects devoted to community building) and a highly inclusive method; ii) a medium-long term orientation in strategic planning, which enforces a strongly positive learning-by-doing experience; and iii) good governance, which serves as a working example for the functioning of larger institutions in the Alpine Space.
The paper also offers an assessment of the weaknesses of the community. In this regard, it highlights a need for wider and deeper utilisation of European structural funds, and the lack of a complete dataset on and evaluations of the realised projects.
The paper concludes with a short analysis of the recently approved European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region (EUSALP). This strategy aims to provide coordinated responses and to encourage participants to re-think their strategies in order to increase the number of opportunities available in their territories. EUSALP represents a wider inter-state collaboration frame and enforces a bottom-up perspective on co-operation among different regions. Therefore, it should benefit from the multi-year experience of ARGEAlp.

ALBERTO BRAMANTI è Professore Associato di Economia Applicata presso il Dipartimento “Analisi delle politiche e Management pubblico” (PAM) e Responsabile dell’area Economia Regionale e New Economy del CERTeT (Centro di Economia Regionale, Trasporti e Turismo) dell’Università Bocconi di Milano.

REMIGIO RATTI è stato Professore Ordinario (dal 1982 fino al 2009), titolare della cattedra di “Economia Internazionale” e di “Economia Regionale” all’Università di Friburgo (CH).
remigio.ratti@usi.ch