Voluntary vs mandatory inter-municipal cooperation: the case of Sustainable Urban Development strategies in Western Sicily, Italy

Since the 2014-2020 programming cycle the European Union has increasingly emphasised the need for regional development to consider development strategies that involve spatially and economically interlinked territories. An exemplary case is the sustainable development strategies that cities are expected to deliver, for which a wider spatial focus – such as metropolitan areas and/or city networks – and a more explicit reference to the FUAs concept, are advocated. Strategies for these wider spatial configurations entail stronger inter-municipal cooperation and, ideally, multi-scalar governance relations in order to involve a variety of territorial stakeholders. While the benefits of these partnerships to solve a myriad of urban questions is perfectly clear, equally evident are the risks and challenges for policy deriving from the high political fragmentation in these territories. In Italy, municipalities have been cooperating using a highly diversified range of collaborative arrangements, ranging from voluntary organisational networks to mandatory forms of inter-municipal cooperation. At the same time, while some regions have a well-established experience in the use of innovative institutional arrangements, others are still lagging behind. In this context, this study looks into the case of sustainable urban development in Sicily, where new mechanisms to select the territorial targets of the urban agenda have been introduced for the 2021-2027 programming cycle. Here, with the adoption of the FUAs approach to select the eligible municipalities of the urban agenda, a less flexible and bottom-up territorialisation process is being implemented. By analysing the implications of this choice for the West of Sicily urban system, the paper provides a critical evaluation of the pros and cons of this and other territorialisation mechanisms, from both the planning and governance perspectives.