INNOVATION IN TOOLS AND METHODS FOR LOCAL DEVELOPMENT- IN.LO.DE.
Project PartnersP.I.T. Marmo Platano Melandro (PP1)
Contrada Perolla - 85050 Savoia di Lucania (Pz) Italy
Tel: +39 0971 712114
Fax: +39 0971 712060
URL: www.pitmpm.com
e-mail: info@pitmpm.it
Ing. GAETANO SCHIAVONE (Project Manager)
e-mail: schianino@libero.it
Università degli Studi della Basilicata (PP2)
Laboratorio di Ingegneria dei Sistemi Urbani e Territoriali (LISUT) - Dipartimento di Architettura Pianificazione e Infrastrutture di Trasporto (DAPIT) - Facoltà di Ingegneria
Via Dell'Ateneo Lucano, 10 - 85100 Potenza (Italy)
Tel: +39 0971 201111
Fax: +39 0971 202110
URL: www.unibas.it
Prof. GIUSEPPE LAS CASAS (Project Manager)
Tel: +39 0971 205180
Fax: +39 0971 205185
URL: www.lisut.org
e-mail: lascasas@unibas.it
Kilkis Prefecture (PP3)
2, Metamorfoseos str. - 61100 Kilkis (Greece)
Tel: +30 2341027954
Fax: +30 2341037163
URL: www.kilkis.gr
e-mail: info@kilkis.gr
Dr. POZOUKIDOU GEORGIA (Project Manager)
e-mail: pozoukid@yahoo.com
Introduction
The project IN.LO.DE. (“INnovation in tools and methods for LOcal DEvelopment”) belongs to MODELE component fourth activities: Improving public administration policies and instruments
The overall objective of the project is to improve the territorial competitive through innovations in tools and methods for local development. The methodological approach is based on a “context based” evaluation of past experiences with a systematic recourse to the principles of efficacy and effectiveness of public expenses in the field of state aids for enterprises. This overall objective had been articulated in the following sub-objectives:
i) To improve the efficacy and the effectiveness of Public Administration entitled of programming and managing Structural Funds
ii) To develop local and interregional partnership
iii) To improve the effectiveness of intervention programs and the efficacy of evaluation procedures
In relation to the project objectives had been developed a set of activities organized in a procedural way. Project activities had been oriented to build an intervention program on project territories and to design innovative tools for the management of that program.
The project Partnership is structured in two levels: a territorial level with Local Authorities (the PIT Marmo Platano Melandro and the Kilkis Profecture), and a scientific level represented by the University of Basilicata.
The Project Partners , according with their own institutional role, share the necessity to improve the capacity of Public Bodies to develop programming and managing ools in the field of state aids for enterprises and effective evaluation procedures.
In an operative view the objective is that to develop a “project format” fro the submission od project initiatives of SMEs that raises the projectual quality of proposals and facilitates the evaluation of relevance and pertinences of initiatives.
This vision appears reinforced by the common characteristics of disadvantage in the territorial contexts of Project Partners. Both the Prefecture of Kilkis (in particular the Municipality of Kroussia selected as Sample Area of the project) and the PIT Marmo Platano Melandro present, as the project analysis show, common structural problems that slow down local development. Those situations are directly connected with an evaluation of past experiences in programming Structural Funds and they appears more critical if we consider the progressive reduction of resources in the future programming period after the enlargement of the European Union. Those considerations allow to consider the results of the IN.LO.DE. project transferable in other contexts: “the thousands Basilicate of Europe” or “the thousands Kilkis of Europe”.
1 The Project Activity
Project activities had been articulated in thematic work packages.
The first set of activities refers the context analysis. The followed approach is to give an integrated evaluation of structural variables of territorial contexts at a local scale. This allowed to build a multidisciplinary and complex territorial knowledge. The whole of data and information, organized in a Territorial Information System, is an essential product of the project as it contributes, even if not in a complete way, to enlarge and update the knowledge framework also considering the incoming programming period 2007-2013.
The context analysis had been to be intended as a processual activity never completed in the sense that it needs of continuous updates connected with specific knowledge needs and periodical update of data and information. In this way the Territorial Information System (TIS) represents the appropriate tools to content, organize and elaborate data from analysis.
From instances identified trough analysis had been defined the “exigencies framework” in the two Sample Areas. The identification of the “exigencies framework” had been based on a critical approach oriented to the evaluation of the pertinence with the context in order to overcame the “generalist” approach that often characterizes the definitions of objectives and problems in the programming tools.
During the analysis a central role had been played by the impact evaluation of Structural Funds on the two Sample Areas. This evaluation, connected with the geographic data about the location of investments and projects supported by Structural Funds, permitted to overlay those information wih the traditional components of the territorial analysis. This represents an high value contribution of the IN.LO.DE. project also as an innovative approach.
At the end of the analytical phase had been started the analysis of enterprises experiences in the past programming periods of state aids: the Best Practices Analysis. This second work package it is important to observe that the analyzed experiences lead us to identify a relevant whole of critical elements of the programming and management system in the field of state aids. Even if the analytical base must be enlarged in order to give larger accountability to results.
In a synthetic way we affirm that a more positive evaluation had been reported by Greek operators while in Italy the enterprises express more critical conclusions.
The results of the best practices analysis lead us to point out some substantioal elements:
• The necessity of a radial facilitation of burocratic iter in the process of project financing.
• The necessity to remove external bonds for enterprises to reach the funds (for example employment bounds)
• The necessity to facilitate the admission of enterprises at credit tools also as an alternative to public funds.
• The necessity of certain date and easy procedures for payments.
A central point of IN.LO.DE. project is the whole of activities concerning the prototypes elaboration of operative tools for the management of state aids for enterprises trough the use of methodological approaches proposed by European Union and appropriately modified in order to agree with the territorial context needs.
This work package had been developed through a four steps procedure:
i) development of the methodological approach
ii) transfer of methodologies at an operative scale
iii) review of the methodological assessment on the base of evidences coming from the previous phase and other definitions and methods
iv) applications and development of operative prototypes
The principal project outputs are:
• Territorial Informative System
• The “format” for the submission of SMEs’ projects
• Criteria and procedure for the evaluation of project proposals
• Calls as operative tools for the management of state aids for enterprises
2 Methodological and operative results
The project methodology is based on the use of tools proposed by European Union (Project Cycle Management, SWOT, Logical Framework Approach) for programming activities, partially renewed, and a cogent territorial approach with systematic use of integrated evaluation.
The will to affirm the need of a substantial link between development policies, socio-economic programming and territorial context is one of the concepts on witch the European Union based the programming period 2007-2013.
The Lisbona principles remarked the central role of the context with a renewed attention to the theme of capitalization of resources and experiences and a renewed attention to the effectiveness of the actions implemented.
The IN.LO.DE. project adopts those principles and implements activities oriented to a concrete implementation of the “context based” approach in order to develop operative products: SIT, formats and calls.
2.1 Methodological
The methodological approach of the project had been directly developed by the Engineering Laboratory of Territorial and Urban Systems (LISUT) at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Transport Infrastructures of the University of Basilicata. The work depends also on numerous researches in the sector of planning in European context.
The object of the IN.LO.DE. project represented an interesting field of application and operative synthesis of the most recent methodologies as the Logical Framework Approach.
In a synthetic view the methodological approach can be described as
i) Development of a deep context analysis oriented to the identification of an exigency framework of each project Sample Areas. Evaluation of past
experiences and impacts of the use of Structural Funds in the field of state aids for enterprises. The analysis results contributes to the Territorial Informative System at different scales
ii) Best Practices analysis as an evaluation of operators experiences in the implementation of projects financed by Structural Funds. The analysis has the objective to collect information and suggestions in order to overcome problems and critical aspects in the management processes
iii) Elaboration of “formats” for the submission of SMEs project to public call.
iv) Implementation of the Logical Framework Approach for the definitions of a program of intervention on each sample contexts
v) Identification of evaluation criteria for the selection of SMEs project proposals
vi) Pilot Applications: design of call for the submission of SMEs projects.
The methodological approach of the IN.LO.DE. project is based on the detailed knowledge of the sample territorial contexts. Such a cognitive effort allows to identify the various problems and objectives of the analysed local context both with regard to its social-economic elements and with regard to a larger number of structural variables, also taking the operators’ opinions and experiences into account.
Such a “complication” of the analytical approach aims expressly at reaching a higher level of rationality of the process of planning and management of the resources where the rationality is meant to be as the relevance and the pertinence of the choise of the actions answering to the context instances.
The context knowledge, that is directly linked to the rationality of the programmatic decision, highlights the following aspects:
i) It is a source of the conditions and the limits of any decisions or actions
ii) It defines the field within which the effects and the impacts of the planning action can be evaluated
In fact, the knowledge of the context provides the programme for the necessary input elements. A scarce or incomplete knowledge of these factors would spoil the rationality of the decision, in particular for what concerns the relevance of the objectives on the context. The rationality of the decision gets stronger on the grounds of the levels of widening of the context knowledge limiting the action sphere and addressing the choices towards specific and relevant demands.
A well-structured context analysis lays the bases for the evaluation of the possible effects on the territory. Also the data and the information sources are clarified and the indicators outline appears to be well-structured in order to measure the “performances” of the intervention politics.
This way, the methodological approach, that has been followed, aims at getting over the “indifference towards the output effects” which characterized the previous planning experiences with regard to the state aids to the SMEs. Actually, this is the element separating the action of the public organizations from the actions of the private organizations: while the private organization is not obliged to consider the external effects of its activity (except for those sectors that are regulated by specific regulations of impact: the environment, the energy, the preservation of the resources, etc.), the public organization focuses its attention on the evaluation of the impacts of its own actions, in terms of the benefits and the damages affecting the context.
The idea of programming performance refers to the well-known American law of the 1993 called Government Performance and Result Act (GPRA). Such a law appears to be a “new modus operandi” of the public programming. It schedules three planning instruments: the (five year) Strategic Plan, the (annual and ex-ante) “Performance Plans” and the (annual and ex-post) “Performance Reports”. That is, it fixes a permanent evaluation system of the impacts, in terms of the effectiveness and the efficacy of the public decision.
2.2 The project of the “format”
In this section it will be presented the principal methodological considerations that base the project format for the submission of project proposal at public call for financing.
2.2.1 Programming, projecting and evaluation: the three cruxes of the management of the state aids to the companies.
State Aid is intended to be the public operations aiming to supply the funds or any other service in order to develop productive system of enterprises.
The management of the State Aids involves two characters: the programmer, i.e. the Agency managing the procedure, and the SMEs benefiting from the funds.
Such a dialectic link involves two competitive categories: the policy objectives, planned by the programmer, which can be defined as “local development”; the SMEs’ entrepreneur interests coinciding with their business objectives.
With regard to the policies concerning the incentive pays and the support of the production and business tissue, there have been both several successful cases, with regard to the relapses on territory, and several negative cases.
The programming, planning and the evaluation can be identified as the key cruxes of the procedure structure for the implementation of the aids to the companies.
The programmer cares about the planning of the local development. Planning is intended to be the body of the analyses, evaluations and choices which, following the analysis of a specific context, allow to define the political objectives and actions. On the base of such a planning structure, the programmer is also involved into the management of the policy implementation.
The projecting is a prerogative of the businessman who tries to connect the opportunities coming from the development policies to the specific company needs. During the planning phase, the company objectives must, anyway, be adapted to the planning clues. Such a process is necessary because in order to obtain any funding it is important that the plan objectives tie in with the programme objectives.
Such a mechanism often hides the real expectations of the company toward the project, causing the lost of transparency in the communication process existing between the two characters. That is why it is absolutely necessary that the programmer know the real needs of a specific company in order to be able to develop an effective evaluation of the planning proposals.
The actual procedures supplying the funds to the companies don’t plan an eventual negotiation of the planning proposals. In our opinion, such a situation represents a frailty feature because the characters who are involved into the procedure cannot really compare each other.
With regard to such a relationship existing between the programmer and the beneficiary, the concept of evaluation assume the following meaning: the businessman evaluates the feasibility and convenience of a single project while the programmer evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the plan in respect of the main principals of equity, sustainability and strategic vision of the policies.
An effective evaluation in the hands of the Agencies which are in charge of managing and the government of the local development represents a warrantee of a good performance of the state aids.
2.2.2 Planning and evaluation
The complexity of the policies and the social-economic dynamics, following the choices of the policies, leads with no doubts to consider the value judgment as strictly connected to the territorial, cultural and social contexts. A further element of complexity is represented by the body of the values and interests characterizing the evaluator, the planning authority and all the local actors who are involved in.
Within the planning of the state aids to the companies, the evaluation activity represents almost exclusively a “duty” of the planner. The planner evaluates the social-economic context of implementation, the planning proposals and their implementation, any eventual impact on the structural components of the context. The valuation is a process activity leading to the value judgment about the policy, through various steps.
The statements of the evaluation judgments, with regard to each planning step, generate from a process which links the lack of total objectivity to the methodological strictness and the necessity to be transparent. In spite of this, the value of the evaluation is not debased because it has to be intended as a process, based on partial information and measurements, contributing to address the management of the planning toward the principles of effectiveness and efficacy.
The evaluation is legitimized by the processing nature it must put on when facing difficult situations which are characterized by various actors.
2.2.3 Integrated evaluation
The planning and the evaluation share a binding process characteristic: the idea of a trial, through which all the decisions are taken, is linked to the idea of evaluation as a process strictly connected to the project cycle (Las Casas 1992). It would be restrictive trying to solve the evaluation problems through the simple application of some techniques (substantive approach or problem solving).
Within the “cycle of the evaluation”, there can be identified three typologies which are linked to the various phases of the project cycle:
• the evaluation of the state of things.
• the evaluation of the strategies, plans or alternative projects in order to identify the preferred choice
• the evaluation of the results which have been achieved following a the realization of a project.
The steps of the project cycle, with regard to the most spread methodological direction, are the following:
o Identification of the project and its raison d’etre (Identification of the needs)
o Project processing (Evaluation of the consistency existing among the logical links which allow the comparison between the actions and the expected results)
o Evaluation and pronouncement about the choice to invest or not (Comparative evaluation between the costs and the benefits of the various strategies, included the “zero option”)
o Implementation (On-going evaluation)
o Final evaluation (audit)
o Ex-Post evaluation (deliberations about the effects obtained during the application of the project)
The connection of the phases of the project is always ordered by various functions, as following:
o Continue toward the subsequent step
o Go back to one of the previous steps
o Give up the project
The cycle of evaluation is expected to answer a body of questions emerging from each step, as the following:
o When the evaluation of the state of things requests the statement of the raison d’etre and the targets of the project (coherence between the objectives and the context)
o When the evaluations highlight the necessity to take into account the possibility that something unexpected can happen.
o When it is necessary to fix the costs and the benefits expected to derive from the project, to find the main worrying sources and to circumscribe the choices.
o When the comparative evaluation leads to choose whether intervene or not and what needs to be changed about the project.
o When the evaluation of the project state of advancement requests us to decide whether going on with the project or not.
o When we are asked to decide whether the hypotheses, which had previously been formulated, were reliable.
The phases of the cycle of evaluation are identified as the following:
• The evaluation of the state of things
• The ex-ante evaluation
• The on-going evaluation
• The final evaluation
• The ex-post evaluation
2.2.4 How the project format originates
The traditional supply of state aids to the companies has always been characterized by an appraisal of the plan performances made of aggregate data. This way, we can achieve medium judgements which respect the individualities of each one implementation context by avoiding to highlight neither the positive cases or the negative ones. This depends on the procedure structure characterizing such a sector of the planning of the social-economic development.
Such a proposal aims to highlight the value of the project within the process of management of the state aids. This task can be achieved only if we revalue the principle according to which the nature of the aid regime to the companies is to stimulate the SMEs production system with regard to a specific context through the prize-giving of all the most significant initiatives.
The performances of the promotional policies must, anyway, refer to each single project performances and not only to the average values. In our opinion it is very important, with regard to the sector of the state aids to the companies, to valuate each specific investment project in order to assess the eventual impact on the context. If the evaluation focuses only on the body of the aggregate data (i.e., a new forward employment of the aid regime; global investment; global impacts on the environments, etc.), neglecting the specificities, it is not possible to activate the binding process of “learning from experiences”.
A strong element that can characterize the effectiveness and the efficacy of the public investments in the sector of the state aids is, by all means, the format of presentation of the project which is developed by the beneficiaries.
The value of the formats addressing the planning toward various virtuous procedure paths is double: from the planner’s point of view, it eases the critical reading and, consequently, the evaluation of every one planning idea with regard to the general and specific objectives of reference; from the beneficiary’s point of view, it allows the realization of the aid regime with regard to a well-structured project. In fact, the project must be pertinent to the specific needs of the companies and also with regard to the objectives of plan.
The strong connection between the objectives of the project and the ones of the program allow the beneficiary to obtain the benefits which are linked to the transversal policies of the project. Such an interconnection adds some more value to the project and allows to evaluate the achievement of the effectiveness and efficacy targets planned, at the same time, both by the planner and by the beneficiary.
The INTERREG programmes contributed to increase such an instrument. The strong interconnection between the formats for the editing of the planning proposals within the Call for Proposal Interreg and the structure of the Project Cycle Management led the projects toward the respect of the concepts of feasibility and relevancy.
The kind of distribution of the public funds in the field of the state aids highlight a further critical situation with regard to the objective to make increasingly effective and, above all, efficient the system of the resources planning.
The usual praxis is the one to provide the financing notifications with very short formats often mixing the product with the objective. Such a condition limits the appraisal of the proposals exclusively to a comparison between permissible voices of cost and demands. It is not so easy for the planner to evaluate the concrete consistency of the plan with regard to the purposes of the planning; it is increasibly more difficult a strategic appraisal of the effective possibilities of success and of the relapses that the plan suggests within the development policies.
Such a situation represents a concrete weakness of the system for the distribution of the state aids because it doesn’t promote the global planning idea and the beneficiary’s motivations and expectations.
The request to supply the financing demand with an "action plan" - which is intended as the identification of the planning idea, the appraisal of the market of reference – certainly represents an important effort. However, these documents do not give back a logical articulation of the planning idea but rather a general reconnaissance of the intervention.
The concrete proposal of the IN.LO.DE. project lies in the inclusion of a renewed Logframe Matrix within the project format.
The clear conciseness of the inner information and the possibility to explicit, in a quantitative way, the result pointers (effectiveness and efficiency) together with the context pointers (i.e., descriptive charts and quantitative analyses of the needs) would ease the appraisal of each one proposal.
This way, the development of the evaluation criteria can be strictly referred to the identification of various minimal and maximum values thresholds for the indicators in the matrix. Moreover, the indicators, which are built taking into account the criteria of measurableness, feasibility and relevancy, supply various elements for a concrete self-evaluation.
The project format represents an opportunity for the planner to verify the effectiveness and the efficiency of a planning idea the way to graduate the implementation of the aid policies consistently with a global cognitive structure of the planning proposals coming from a suitable evaluation activity.
The effectiveness of policies can be interpreted as a physical and procedural effectiveness.
The physical efficacy refers to the realization of the products. The procedural effectiveness develops on the base of the process of construction of the plan: identification of the objectives, explication of the results and choice of the actions. Such a process allow the beneficiary to self-evaluate his own proposal with regard to the objectives and the clues of the program.
The effectiveness is to be intended as a link between the products and the costs, but it can also deal with the comparison among the various intervention typologies.
The planner’s evaluation turns out to be effective and useful whether:
o it deals with the direct verification of the quantitative information supplied from the pointers and it is not reduced to a simple summarized interpretation of the plan feasibility
o it inquires about the logical coherence of the plan
o it measures the degree of consistency between the project objectives and the program objectives
o it measures the efficiency of the planning proposal
2.2.5 The procedural scheme
Following the previous observations, it seems to originate a first proposal with regard to the methodological formulation starting from the programming phase of the state aids for the local development and ending with a project format.
The procedural scheme which has been suggested is the following:
o The planning is to be developed through a matrix of the logframe whose contents develop the addresses which have been identified on a regional scale
o The operative planning, in detailing the objectives, the actions and the results, produces various sub-matrixes where we introduce some context pointers circumscribing and reducing the territorial scale of reference and identify various "target areas". The territorial specificity can be intended as "inclusion/affiliation" of the plan to the target area or as a "relationship" in a territorial, social-economic, production or functional sense
o The notification with regard to the operative implementation of the development policies identify the targets of reference with regard to the pointers which have been opportunely built. The identification of various result ranges allows to measure the evaluation criteria and so to ease the scoring and the ordering of the planning proposals
o The presentation format of the project forces the beneficiaries to build a logframe matrix of the plan
o The evaluation activity explicits with regard to the specific contents of the project and also with regard to the identification of the eventual lapses on the immaterial values, that can be represented by the transversal political objectives, as to say the preservation of the identity, cultural, historical, landscape, social heritage
2.2.6 The sections of the format
The format proposal which has been developed is strongly oriented to the evaluation: in fact, the sections characterizing the project greed match with the main moments of the evaluation activity. The project format, which has been developed, is made up of the following sections:
o The first section is devoted to the "Eligibility Check" that is the demonstration of the characteristics which are require in order to take part or not in the category of the beneficiaries
o In the second section, the investments or rather the technical and functional characteristics of the assets and the services featuring it are shown
o The Logframe matrix explicating the coherence and the feasibility of the project with regard to the clues of the plan
o The charts concerning the exploitation of the consistency of the project objectives which are required by the logframe matrix
o The charts showing the process of construction and evaluation of different planning alternatives
The first and the second section reflect the actual managing procedures of the public financings with regard to the policies for the local development which are co-financed by the community funds. The last three sections reflect the necessity for the evaluator to be granted some concrete elements for the scoring and the ordering of the proposals based on the reading of the logical structure of plan.
2.2.6.1 First section: Eligibility Check
The first section comes from the identification of the beneficiaries of the policies within the project. The format is structured in order to supply all the information allowing to set in clear way the affiliation of the proposers in a group of recipients which is codified inside the program.
With regard to the first section, an appraisal judgment which seems to be inclusive/excluding is developed. If a correspondence between the proposing character and the category of the beneficiaries, one gets on to the following steps otherwise one rejects the proposal. The elements contained in this section are the following:
o Description of the company (its denomination, its corporate and productive order, the definition of business).
o Description of the economic and financial structure of the company (with regard to the details needed for a correct assessment of the reliability of the company)
o SWOT analysis of the company aiming to provide for a global description of the company referring to the market of reference and to one’s own territorial context.
2.2.6.2 Second sections: Investiments
The second section is structured through a short description of the investment assets and gives an account of the technical details, the products categories, their costs and all the information necessary to specify their use within the production process.
With regard to this section, an out-and-out evaluation judgment is not expressed. The information which are contained are needed for the technical and economical verifications and for the investment statement.
The elements which are included in this section are the following:
o A description of the production process which the investment has an impact on which is necessary to understand the productive destination of the outfits/services involved by the proposal
o The list of the outfits/services with an suitable description of their productive function as well as some clues about their cost, the voice of permissible expense, and various references to the project activities and results which are dealt with in the third section
2.2.6.3 Third section: Logframe Matrix
The third section represents an effort of synthesis which the beneficiary is required in order to reply to the evaluation necessity, based on an objective and pertinent activity of scoring with regard to the planning objectives and the plan feasibility and supporting. With regard to this section, a judgment of appraisal of the plan with regard to the clues of the development policies is developed (Strategic Evaluation).
The evaluator attention must focus above all on the understanding of project logic which is intended as a structure made of links among the objectives, the results and the action.
The logframe allows an organic vision of the project which is considered as a unitary and closed system. The links existing among these elements give back the logical structure of the plan.
In our formulation, the matrix allows, through the appraisal of the relevancy and the pertinence of objectives, to read the organization of the plan with regard to the production, environmental and social-economic context which is outside the structures of the proposers. Moreover, in such a sense the "Assumptions" have a key role. In fact, these statements express the contribution of the external variables on which is not exercised a direct influence on. From the control of such variables, the feasibility of the operations and the real possibility to achieve the objectives derive.
Indicators represent the objective system of parameters for the appraisal. They express the degree of attainment of targets which are fixed in the planning phase and therefore answer to the necessity of objective references for the ordering and the scoring of the proposals in the admittance ranking. Indicators are also useful for the beneficiary in order to carry out various activities for the of the project with regard to the attainment of the objectives.
2.2.6.4 Fourth section: Relevance of the project objectives
The charts concerning the relevancy of the plan objectives with regard to the territorial context of reference give an account of the analyses the company carries out when predisposing the planning proposal. They supply a reading of the context from the beneficiary’s point of view.
These analyses represent a further instrument for reading the territory that the planner can use in order to increase the acquaintance of the trends and dynamics in action.
2.2.6.5 Fifth section: project alternatives
The evaluation among the various project alternatives for the attainment of a specific objective is a strong element of value characterizing a planning proposal. This way, the adoption of charts describing such a decisional process within the documentation for the access to the public financings represent a warrantee of quality.
3 The four families of evaluation criteria.
We have identified four more families of criteria that are added to the traditional ones:
3.1 Assent to the LF
The Logical Framework Approach, together with the “Context Based” evaluation of the sample areas, represent the base for the methodological approach of the IN.LO.DE. project. The structure of the Logframe Matrix has been also proposed within the “Format for the presentation of the planning proposals”, as a tool of synthesis of the intervention logic.
So, the first group of evaluation criteria refers to an esteem of the level of pertinence of the project objectives, results and the actions with the program previsions.
3.1.1 THE SINERGY AMONG THE ACTIONS
The attention is focuses on the coordination of the program actions within the project. The structure of the project that has been drawn up by the SME implements, first of all, the “core” actions. Certainly, such a set of activities is strictly linked to other activities that can be defined as transversal or subordinate compared to the first ones but it does not cover the whole program activity outline (1).
Anyway, within the program structure, the links existing among the different activities are clearly evident. These logical links among the program actions can generate various criteria and evaluations of the project proposals.
This represents an important element for the definition of the evaluation criteria featuring the public call.
Here it is a simple example:
• The programme structure schedules three groups of actions (Measures): A, B, C (each one of them is composed of a definite number of activities: A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2, C1, C2, C3)
• The call for the financing of the project proposals schedules to activate various investments referring to the activities of the family C (C1, C2)
• The programme structure is characterized by some horizontal relations among the various activities of the different families.
• It will be necessary to clarify these mutual influences within the call because between two projects showing the same level of pertinence with the specifications of the call, the better project will be the one integrating the largest number of actions.
This approach improves a current procedure, adopted in the management of the politics for the financing of the enterprises. Such a procedure adds to the traditional transversal premialities (ex. The environment preservation, the employment, etc.) those premialities which are strictly consistent with the politics that can be better evaluated in terms of impacts and results.
3.1.2 THE EFFECTIVENESS AND THE EFFICACY OF THE RESULTS
The introduction of various quantitative parameters, allowing an evaluation of the effectiveness and the efficacy of the project, within the formats for the submission of new project proposals represents an important element for the scoring.
The effectiveness and efficacy evaluation, carried out ex-ante the project implementation, needs an evaluation of the reliability of the projects esteems (with regard to its impacts, its results, the market, the employment, etc.).
3.1.3 THE PERTINENCE OF THE PROJECT OBJECTIVES
As for the program, the definition of its objectives must be necessarily sectorial and open, without any inclusion of peculiarities of planning level. For example, with regard to a problem of “Scarse usage of the spaces of a given X production area”, it is necessary to define the objective “Improvement of the X production area for new craft settlements” but not “Improvement of the X production area for new craft settlements into the Y sector (ex. the textile sector)” because such a definition does not seem to be consistent with the identified problem but it appears to be incorrect if referred to the programme context.
As for the project, the definition of its objectives must be operational: it would be then correct to notice an objective like “Improvement of the X production area with a new craft settlement into the textile sector – silk production” while it appears to be absolutely unevaluable an objective like “Improvement of the X production area” because it would not allow to go deeply into a matter of the connection with the context.
3.2 The quality of the industrial plan
According to the most recent programmatic procedures with regard to the sector of the state aids to the SMEs, and considered the results of the Best Practices analysis, within the IN.LO.DE project, our proposal aims at increasing the number of the actors taking part in the process for the management of the state aids. In particular, it appears to be possible the passage from the duality of the relation between the Planner / Manager and the Beneficiary to an open comparison where the credit institutions are meant to take part in the evaluation of the economic-financial quality of the project proposals, by warranting the access to the credit tools of the single SME, at least for what concerns a significant share of the budget of the project. This guarantee, that is granted at the rate of the participation of the SME to the funds call, becomes a requirement of eligibility for the access to the funds.
Such an approach would allow to obtain the following results:
i) A concrete dialogue and comparison mechanism between the SME and the Credit Institution, allowing the SMEs to overcome the economic-financial troubles affecting themselves following the attribution of the state aids and which often become a cause of failure (in terms of effectiveness and efficacy of the impacts).
ii) The attention is displaced on the quality of the project proposals, because the guarantee of the Credit Institution aims, on one hand, at the evaluation of the economic-financial solidity of the company while, on the other hand, it aims at the evaluation of the feasibility and of the real potentialities of the investment project.
iii) Through the guarantee of the access of the project to the credit tools, the planner shares with the Credit Institutions the responsibility of the technical evaluation of the investment proposals. This way, the Planner can perform his function according to the pertinence and the relevance of the project with regard to the program mission and, particularly, according to the consistency with the logical structure of the program.
3.3 The connection between the project and the framework of the infrastructure planning on the local context
An important element for the success of the SMEs projects is represented by the integration with the public planning framework.
According to the idea of capitalization of the public intervention, the state aids must be necessarily well-integrated with the resources and the planned interventions on the territory. The idea of capitalization widens the evaluation of the effectiveness and the efficacy at a lager scale.
3.4 Coherence with the government territorial tools
According to the idea of contextualization of the planning initiatives of the SMEs, it appears to be important to evaluate the coherence between the territorial project initiatives and the provisions that the plans and the programmes generate on the territorial context.
Such a kind of evaluation appears to be easy if you have got a complete and detailed cognitive outline. For such a purpose, the instrument of the Territorial Information System is absolutely necessary because, through the overlay mapping or the most modern tools for the space analysis, it allows to evaluate minutely the quantity and quality aspects of a given area, where the social-economic dimension interacts with the environmental and physical ones, with the mobility, the risk etc. up to the decrease of the (probably indefinite) number of the territorial variables. In particular, the SIT becomes an instrument for checking the pertinence of the project with the territorial bounds, with the functional discrepancies and with the intervention priorities.
4 Conclusions and future perspective of the project
The ambitious objective to develop tools and methods for the improvement of procedures in programming and managing Structural Funds in the field of State Aids for enterprises can not be reached in one project but must start a open process of participation in witch must be involved many actors directly or indirectly interested in the local development policies. This process will contribute to the development of a rational planning practice strictly connected with the territorial context.
The strategic prospective of IN.LO.DE. results can be found in the operative contribution in the application of methodologies proposed by the European Union on sample contexts showing similar characteristic in terms of development demand.
IN.LO.DE traces a methodological process and an operative one, both coherent with the programmatic issue of the incoming programming period 2007-2013.
Of course it is necessary to enlarge the analysis to a wider number of contexts and experiences and an operative implementation of methodologies and tools developed in the project could be helpful in order to improve them.
