The final webinar of the 2024 Autumn semester took place on 11 December (11:00 – 12:00 UK) over Zoom, with Miriam de Oliveira Gonçalves from CIAUD – URBinLAB (Urbanism & Territorial Dynamics) presenting “Examining Local Action Groups as Territorial Development Polities: CLLD in Lisbon Metropolitan Area”.
Over the past three decades, Local Action Groups (LAGs) have gained significant relevance as territorial development polities. Initially established in the 1990s under the LEADER programme, EU-funded LAGs were lauded for their ability to engage local stakeholders, promote proactivity, and build capacity for designing and implementing Local Development Strategies (LDS). With the introduction of the Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) policy initiative in the 2014-2020 Community Support Framework, the geographical scope of LAGs expanded beyond rural and coastal to include urban areas.
However, there is a standing critique regarding the role and impact of LAGs in creating spatial-temporal fixes, addressing local issues through innovative governance arrangements, and facilitating multi-level interaction and territorial rescaling. This paper focuses on the Lisbon Metropolitan Area to critically examine these aspects amidst ongoing Europeanisation dynamics and a soft turn in planning theory and practices. Specifically, we scrutinize LAGs’ strategic territorial rationale, cultural adherence, institutionalization, and the intra- and inter-politics of their governance arrangements.
The findings indicate limitations in governance rescaling due to the instrumentalization, over-centralization, and standardization of LAGs by external powers, which hinder their potential role and impact as territorial development polities and agents of state re-articulation.
Miriam de Oliveira Gonçalves is a PhD candidate and researcher at CIAUD – URBinLAB (Urbanism & Territorial Dynamics and collaborator member at CIAUD), Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Design of Lisbon School of Architecture, Universidade de Lisboa. A chartered Architect and Urbanist (FAU-USP), Miriam completed her masters in Urbanism in 2017 at University of São Paulo (USP) and obtained the equivalent degree of Integrated Masters in Urbanism at Lisbon School of Architecture (FAUL) in 2018. Graduated in 1994, her career started at the Urban Planning Department of the Municipality of Santo André / Brazil. Later, she lived in São Paulo, London, and Lisbon, working as an architect and urbanist, developing projects in the sectors of master planning, urbanism and architecture (residential, retail and mixed uses).
In a career shift in 2020, she started a PhD in Urbanism and was granted a scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology of the Portuguese Government (FCT). Since then, Miriam has published and participated in seminars on Spatial Planning, Urban Studies, Cinema and Human Rights. Member of the Research Project SOFTPLAN Ref. PTDC/GES-URB/29170/2017 (FCT), she is currently developing her PhD in the scope of the themes of the aforementioned project, specifically researching the implementation of the European Commission soft policy instrument CLLD (Community-Led Local Development) in Portugal.
The recording of the webinar can be watched below or on our YouTube channel and you can access Gonçalves’s full article here.
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