The role of the European Union in local development: an exploration study of the Veneto Region in North East Italy

The paper assesses the main results of an explorative study based on 130 in-depth interviews with local development sector-operators in Italy’s Veneto Region. Its aim was to assess the interviewees’ attitudes towards their specific policy area and their overall understanding of the multi-level dimension of local development governance processes. From the interviews conducted it emerged that, particularly as far as training policies are concerned, the Region’s role as intermediary is central to multi-level policy networks. The Region’s difficulty in being able to ensure that it can continue coordinating the growth of local development also emerged, and represents a significant result which can be referred to as the paradox of the politics of regional activism: on the one hand, the Regions are being granted the opportunity to become actively involved in the implementation of European policies; on the other, because of this involvement, they are obliged to take on the delicate and controversial role of political intermediaries which means that they are sometimes considered to be merely ‘filtering’ the information coming from the European Union.