Abstract

The inclusion of industrial policies in the European policymakers' agenda, firstly evoked by the Bangemann Report in 1990, has recently been made explicit in the priorities of the Lisbon Strategy and the documents subsequently emanated to make it more operational. The new European industrial policy strategy, while giving a central role to horizontal policies, also requires greater sensitivity towards the specificities of some sectors. At the same time, the identification and implementation of such policies critically need special consideration for the territorial, national and regional contexts, to which the policy has to be coherently adapted. The policy mechanism design is defined in a governance setting, where there European institutions set the policy goals and general guidelines and the National governments and the Regions have the critical role to implement them. A complex governance and policy design system emerges, where a double coherence has to be searched between the European general objectives and the territorial specific context. The present paper discusses these topics and introduces four papers dedicated to specific aspects of the new European industrial policy and its territorial impact.