Polycentric development, territorial cohesion, and territorial diversity are some of the main principles supported at the European level for reducing regional disparities and for making territories more resilient and diversified, which strengthens the competitiveness of Europe in the global economy. This research article, starting from the final results of the ESPON Linking Networks of Protected Areas to Territorial Development (LinkPAs) project, considers that the protected areas (PAs) are a territorial unit able to connect—in a polycentric approach—the different territorial aspects (economic, social, environmental) present in an area to implement cross-border public services (CPS) to share in a larger territorial context through a network of protected areas (NPA). Toward this aim, this paper suggests applying the NPA management model developed in the ESPON LinkPAs project to CPS to assess if a soft governance mechanism is able to efficiently and sustainably manage the CPS.

Abstract:The paper focuses on territorial impacts of the European policy with regards to the enterprise systems in the last decade and how the effects of this policy could have irreparable modified the enterprise network relationships (socio-functional and interrelated/cohesive) in regions. This suspicion has suggested European choices include the territorial dimension in the development directions by the intra and inter-regional co-operation. The searching new forms of balanced growth for enterprise is the future objective; it could be followed by assuming a territorial polycentric cohesive organization. Important European documents, like Europe 2020 Strategy and Territorial Agenda (2011), stress this orientation. A critical review of Economic Geography literature with regards to main localisation theories of enterprise opens this contribution, in order to accompany the reader in understanding of new strategic parameters able to measure `the regional productive capability' of enterprises in the framework of European recent directions. By using innovative methodologies, the performance of enterprise systems and networks looking at these parameters, highlights European specific territorialised typologies of behaviour. Finally, some policy recommendations are suggested in this direction in order to improve the regional productivity, as well as the employment in relation with to specific economic-social-environmental parameters of cohesion and competitiveness in sustainability, looking at the regional productive capability of Small/Medium Firms (SMFs) in Europe with regards to main pillars of the 2014-2020 Strategy.Keywords: Enterprises' Economic Geography, European Competitiveness, Sustainability Sustainable and Economic Cohesive Development Versus Economic Growth of Enterprises Systems and NetworksThe review and comparison of relevant theoretical/academic literature identify key concepts and definitions with regards to competitiveness and sustainability, and, more recently, to cohesion.In the 1990s, the literature on competitiveness, sustainability and cohesion is developed under different and no linked scientific domains; the research on the competitiveness performance concerning enterprises is the largest and more dynamic. Since the 2000s, interdisciplinary relationships among these three concepts are developed.Initially, competitiveness is considered by different forms of access to foreign markets and as one of the main factors of the theory of international exchange the study of the behavior and strategy of the enterprise. The basic causes of competitiveness were to be studied according to diverse starting resources and different technological levels, in relation to scale performances and to the change of the factors prices and assets [4,16,20,32].A few works only extend the analysis to the role of the access procedures to foreign markets (internationalization)1 . The internationalisation of the enterprises was only one of the components influencing the firm's competitiveness and its role could be estimated o...

The paper proposes the territory as the fourth dimension of sustainable development. Research starting from three dimensions of sustainable development - economic, social, environmental - highlights the difference between the spatial approach and the territorial approach in sustainable development practices. The paper shows that to include in the development approach the morphological (hilly, mountain, plain), functional (metropolitan or non-metropolitan city, cross border region), traditional (port city, financial city, industrial city), government (National strategy, special laws, etc.), governance (formal and not formal network, institutional/ noninstitutional body) aspects, leads to different development results than not including them. This evidence shows to distinguish development practices from sustainable development practices as emerged from recent Territorial Impact Assessment studies in which policies, through the territorialization of the results, guide planning actions: (local) planning actions selected on (general) policy objectives create the conditions for adaptation (about planning) and mitigation (about policies) of human actions on the environment, thus being able to speak of sustainable development.

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