Agents of Local Economic Development Policies (in Portugal): is the Inter-Municipal Sphere the Most Relevant?

Financial constraints have forced decision-makers to become imaginative and entrepreneurial, opening the door to a series of risks to democratic governance. The need for local government flexibility and imagination in policy-making has led to the search for alternative solutions, including the sharing of responsibilities with actors from the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors to accomplish its mission. The goal of this paper is to map and evaluate local policy agents for economic development strategies in the Portuguese municipality of Aveiro, by using social network analysis (SNA). We aim to understand if economic development policies are still a product of local networks, with a strong influence of municipal public actors, or if it is a product of inter-municipal or regional economic alliances and multi-sector actors. Aveiro is located in one of the most dynamic inter-municipal structures of Portugal and therefore pictures a relevant case to analyse the influence of inter-municipal and multi-sectoral actors in economic development strategies. Structured interviews with key informants in this policy area were conducted to gather data allowing the team to map the actors involved in economic development subsystem. The following research questions framed the investigation: 1) what type of organizations make up the economic policy subsystem and what is the role played by each actor in it? 2) Are the actors/organizations connected around networks? 3) If so, what kinds of network patterns or structures (local, inter-municipal or regional) are influential in the design and delivery of these policies? And finally, 4) how strong is the presence of municipal public actors compared to other actors and actors outside the local sphere? This enabled to understand the type and the level of action of the organizations engaged in the formulation, decision making and implementation of economic development policies in Aveiro.