Area 6 - Territorial governance

You are kindly invited to use the table of content on your right to navigate.

Territorial governance of VET refers to the place-based dimension of multilevel VET governance, those aspects of multilevel governance that are intended to align the VET system with regional and local needs. Acting effectively at the regional or local level requires the development of mechanisms for vertical and horizontal coordination, founded on partnerships that link the VET system with stakeholders at both these levels, as well as with government actors at the national and sub-national levels, based on a sector-wide approach. From an economic development perspective, territorial VET governance builds on the concept of local economic development. The VET system at the regional or local level faces the challenge of aligning itself with regional or local development strategies, as well as with the strategies of local employers and locally significant economic sectors.

The need to develop the territorial governance of VET naturally emerges in the context of a Foresight-based vision-building exercise, where the desire to align VET with territorial development strategies is explicitly formulated. The challenge of doing so is then clarified with the use of governance tools such as the Review of Institutional Arrangements, and many of the required reforms will be included in the roadmap accompanying the Foresight vision statement.

Pressure to introduce an explicit system of territorial VET governance can arise in different ways – for example, in the context of a policy of decentralisation, as was the case in Ukraine. The ETF has developed a number of governance tools to help partner countries address the issue of territorial governance. The general approach is to start with a self-assessment of multilevel VET governance, followed up with an independent assessment by the ETF and a team of experts that prepares the ground for joint work on recommendations. After this, the full range of VET governance tools can be deployed to implement specific measures. These include measures to develop social partnerships and introduce reforms to VET finance and funding.

A wide variety of tools have been developed by the ETF for partner countries embark on this path. ENTFORM 21 is dedicated to the topic of territorial VET governance and provides useful orientation. The case of Ukraine supplies lessons, learning opportunities and resources which will be of use to other ETF partner countries. Resources available online from the ETF website include: notes on the decentralisation of VET governance in Ukraine; an ex-ante analysis of policy options for the optimisation of regional VET networks in Ukraine, based on the ETF PRIME methodology; guidelines to help policy makers with the establishment of Regional VET Councils; and a Green Paper preparing the ground for new legislation by facilitating parliamentary debate. Other resources include material from a policy learning workshop on VET decentralisation, financing and innovation, a Briefing Note on smart territories, and on linking VET to innovation policy at the regional level.

An important discovery of the ETF Entrepreneurial Communities initiative is that the kind of collaborative partnerships that characterise good territorial governance can arise both in contexts where official policies do not support governance principles such as subsidiarity and where governance models are already moving towards a multilevel approach. The stories of how these partnerships are developed and what they can accomplish is recounted in a series of reports focusing on Algeria, Belarus, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia. The case of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina also provides an example of how it is possible to approach the task of aligning local VET policy with local strategies for smart development.