Good Governance Practices
Creators: name: Munster Technological University
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This document constitutes the collection of “Good Governance Practices” elaborated as a deliverable

(D1.2) in the framework of the ROBIN project.

ROBIN sets out to empower Europe’s regional authorities to fulfil their role as agents of just,

inclusive, and resilient economic development for their territories. The project provides support to

co-shape their governance structures and models in ways that accelerate the deployment of their

circular bioeconomy targets, while also promoting social innovation and accounting for different

territorial contexts. Under this light, ROBIN entails several activities that involve collecting, producing,

and processing data to generate meaningful insights that will feed into the project and fuel the co-

creation and delivery of demand-driven and evidence-based results.

In this context, Deliverable 1.2 ”Good Governance Practices” sets out to identify a range of good

governance practices for supporting local operators and innovation developers in the circular

bioeconomy. These practices are drawn from across six geographical regions covering the continent

of Europe, supporting different stakeholder groupings, and covering a multitude of different support

types, including policy innovation, education and awareness, social innovations, networking,

financial supports and many more. In total 75 practices have been documented in Section 4.2 and

a further 10 of these have been further developed into case studies within Section 4.1.

This inventory of good practices and case studies will serve as input to later ROBIN Work

Package 2 activities in supporting the 5 ROBIN regions towards the co-development of regional

governance models and structures. To support these efforts, the report highlights key information

from these practices, including whether the models have been or may be replicated to other regions,

which stakeholders are supported, what is the territorial context and what are some of the

environmental, social, and economic benefits resulting from their deployment. In addition, the

good practices have been selected on the basis of their alignment with the definition of good practice,

outlined in Section 2, and care has been taken to ensure that a broad diversity of good practices has

been included to give the regions the widest scope possible. In addition to supporting the regions in

co-creating their good governance practices, the best practices will be useful for other regions across

Europe and beyond who are looking for successful mechanisms to support regional bioeconomy

development.

The 75 good practices included within Section 4.2, include examples from the Balkan Region (12),

Central Europe (7), Eastern Europe (8), Mediterranean (12), Northern Europe (24) and Western

Europe (12). The breakdown of countries within these regional clusters is described in Section 2.

Considering the categorization of instruments covered, and the closest link between the practices

and categories of instruments described by Elbersen et al., (2020) the practices break down across

the following instruments: fiscal and financial instruments (24), regulatory instruments (7),

information and advisory instruments (15), networking, collaboration, and joint planning instruments

(20), voluntary instruments (3), other instruments (6). However, many of practices straddle across

multiple instruments. Drawing from the good practices, several case studies have been selected to

further elaborate the good examples, covering a wide geographical and territorial setting, and a

broad array of initiatives from social innovations, public procurement programmes, funding

programmes, social media awareness campaigns, business models and regulatory instruments.

There are found in Section 4.1.

To complete the analysis, in Section 4.2. the inventory of good practices has been further classified

against a typology of circular bioeconomy governance models developed in ROBIN Task 1.2,

creating a linkage between both studies, and providing practical inspiration towards the

implementation of circular bioeconomy governance structures and models. This document will help

to provide an interesting analysis of transformation paths, enabling and constraining governance

factors, drivers, focus areas and collaborations, providing a better understanding of both the

strengths and limitations of the good practices available within the regions studied.