How an economic development intermunicipal strategic plan transformed three local diagnoses into a coordinated economic revitalization agenda, designed by the territory and for the territory.
Three neighboring municipalities shared an economic fabric, labor market, and visitor flows, yet each planned independently. The key question was not what to do, but how to do it together without diluting the unique identity of each town.
The starting point was a territory that functioned as a cohesive unit in practice but remained fragmented in planning. In fact, residents crossed municipal boundaries every day to work, shop, and access services. Local businesses competed with metropolitan-scale operators, while the productive economy showed signs of losing ground under increasing residential and tourism pressures. The commercial sector was particularly affected, caught between the need to modernize and the difficulty of doing so without structural support. Together, the three towns represented a significant commercial base, but one that was dispersed, lacking both a common strategy and a shared identity.
Against this backdrop, the strategic opportunity was to turn geographical proximity into an asset for joint planning. The challenge was to generate real synergies between administrations, scale up coordinated measures that no municipality could implement alone, and build a package of actions grounded in the actual needs of businesses, retailers, and residents. The goal was not to produce yet another technical document, but to create an operational tool for action.
“No municipality has, on its own, the critical mass needed to reverse the dynamics affecting all three. Scale is achieved through coordination, not competition.”
We combined a comprehensive quantitative diagnosis with intensive fieldwork: forty interviews with key stakeholders, two roundtable discussions, and biweekly validation sessions with municipal technical teams throughout the project.
“Participation was not a procedural requirement; it was the analytical tool that transformed aggregated data into actionable evidence about what truly works in each town.”
Our diagnostic phase began with an extensive review of secondary sources: hundreds of documents, including sector studies, statistical datasets, economic activity reports, previous municipal plans, and benchmark references from other territories. This large-scale documentary analysis provided a rigorous and contextualized understanding of the territory before fieldwork began.
Building on this foundation, we designed a participatory process as an analytical instrument rather than a formal consultation exercise. In total, forty semi-structured interviews involved public institutions, foundations, associations, social stakeholders, and companies from key economic sectors. Furthermore, two open surveys served as a mechanism for triangulating findings.
Each interview was documented in an individual stakeholder profile summarizing key arguments, data contributions, qualitative assessments, and actionable opportunities. This system ensured full traceability throughout the Plan: every proposed measure could be linked directly to insights provided by stakeholders with first-hand knowledge of the territory, strengthening the analytical robustness of the work.
The outcome was a strategic plan structured around a package of key measures designed to generate measurable impact in the short and medium term, while remaining aligned with the actual capabilities of the three municipalities.
All measures were organized according to a dual logic. On one hand, coordinated actions were designed to be implemented jointly across the three municipalities in order to achieve greater scale—from commercial coordination and joint tourism promotion to the rationalization of training provision and the activation of strategic sectors such as culture, sport, the care economy, and health. Identified during the participatory process as high-potential drivers of territorial development, these sectors expanded the economic agenda beyond retail and positioned the three towns as a diversified and cohesive productive ecosystem.
Notably, stakeholder feedback proved remarkably consistent and emerged as one of the process’s most valuable assets. Participants from different sectors, professional backgrounds, and municipalities repeatedly converged on the same key diagnoses, reinforcing the strength of the conclusions. Moreover, their direct involvement in shaping the Plan fostered a sense of co-authorship that facilitates ownership of the proposed measures and increases the likelihood of successful implementation.
“A plan is only implemented when the people who live it can recognize themselves in it. That is why we designed the process so that the territory’s voice would be the driving force, not an ornament.”
As a result, beyond the Plan itself, the process has left a lasting asset for the three municipalities: an updated stakeholder map, a repository of consultable stakeholder profiles, and a shared methodology that can serve as the foundation for future planning initiatives, intermunicipal coordination, and economic development efforts across the territory.
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