Four years ago, as announced in the inaugural speech of President Von der Leyen before the European Parliament on 27 November 2019, the European Commission positioned sustainable development together with the digital agenda as the twin core elements of Europe's overall strategy for the present decade. From an external perspective, the European Green Deal (EGD) could be seen as representing Europe's own 'moonshot mission' of the 21st century: its contribution to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. From an internal perspective, the EGD represented Europe's own 'smart specialization strategy': an internal attempt to take on a leading position in sustainable development and contributing to a new process of what is currently described as competitive sustainability. Viewing the EGD as a combination between an external European 21st century moonshot mission and an internal smart specialization strategy raises though many territorial challenges as to the respective governance responsibilities of the different actors within the EU, particularly given the space-blind nature of most of the proposed and implemented new sustainable rules and regulations. There were indeed no serious reflections on the territorial, place-based implications of such transformation processes. Some financial support was foreseen to act as a cushion for possible very disruptive features of structural transformations, but little was known about the sort, nature and volume of such transformation processes. The report on Place-based innovation for sustainability (McCann & Soete, 2020), which had been prepared just before the COVID-19 outbreak provided a framing and starting point for some initial science for policy reflections of the Partnerships for Regional Innovation (PRI) Scientific Committee members. It revolved around the three basic components of smart specialisation: strategies, implementation, and monitoring/evaluation. If a bottom-up smart specialisation would now target competitive sustainability, what changes would this imply in terms of strategies, implementation and policy learning? The various papers of experts brought together in the book The Square: Putting place-based innovation policy for sustainability at the centre of policy making (Schwaag Serger, Soete & Stierna, 2023, Eds.) provide a comprehensive overview of some of the challenges involved and the policy lessons to be learned. They were instrumental in the development of both the joint initiative of the PRI Pilot launched by the European Commission and the European Committee of the Regions, and the JRC Partnerships for Regional Innovation Playbook (Pontikakis et al., 2022a). The Playbook was developed as a support document with practical policy tools for the PRI Pilot which engaged a large number of regions (63), four Member States, and seven cities which volunteered to co-develop and test the approach, centred on a selection of practical policy tools. The initial issues raised by the PRI Scientific Committee continued to flow as a red line through many of the practical implementation discussions: how to combine directionality at regional level with bottom-up energy? Through niches in possible new value chains in green energy, clean tech, the circular economy focusing on connecting innovation of local firms and ecosystems with supply and value chains? As the PRI concept emphasized in its title, regions could and should better capitalize on alliances, partnerships and networks. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is now entering into a new implementation stage with this new ACTIONbook, which this time focuses fully on implementation, on turning the new concepts that allows one to make sense of the increasing complexity and variety of the territorial problems policymakers face into policies on the ground. We were the co-chairs of the PRI Scientific Committee in a particularly privileged position to contribute with the JRC and the many JRC researchers to these conceptual science for policy reflections. We now look with great trepidation to the implementation of such policies. Indeed, today is the priority time for action!
