On 1–2 October, I attended the ARL Congress 2026 in Cologne, organised by the Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association (ARL). ARL brings together researchers and practitioners working on spatial planning, regional development and territorial policy, and its annual Congress provides a useful space for exchange between academic research and policy practice. Participants included researchers, planners and representatives of public administrations and regional and European institutions from Germany and other European countries.
This year’s Congress, “European Regional Policy in Times of Transition,” addressed regional transformation and the changing environment for spatial planning and regional policy. The Congress programme covered the future of EU Cohesion Policy, competitiveness and territorial cohesion, cross-border and transnational cooperation, housing, multi-level governance, citizen participation and experimental approaches to regional development.
As an LDnet Board member, I was particularly interested in what these debates mean for local development. Behind many of the discussions was a question that is also central to LDnet’s work: how can European and national strategic objectives be reconciled with the diversity of places and the capacity of local communities to shape their own development?
A changing architecture for Cohesion Policy
This question is becoming particularly important in the debate on EU Cohesion Policy after 2027. The emerging architecture of the next Multiannual Financial Framework points towards stronger strategic coordination and a potentially greater role for national plans.
From a local development perspective, the crucial issue is therefore not simply how much funding will remain available. It is also how much room the future system will provide for place-based strategies, functional territories and bottom-up initiatives.
Several Congress discussions stressed the importance of maintaining a territorial perspective within a changing European policy architecture. Competitiveness and cohesion should not necessarily be treated as opposing objectives. Strengthening Europe’s competitiveness also depends on mobilising the capacities and potential of different types of territories rather than concentrating attention only on already successful metropolitan centres.
European cooperation is not territorially neutral
The Congress discussions on cross-border and transnational cooperation illustrated why this matters.
Participation in Interreg and other transnational networks is not territorially neutral. Metropolitan and institutionally stronger regions frequently have greater capacities to develop projects and participate in European networks. Rural, peripheral and economically weaker areas may require more active capacity support if European cooperation is to reach a genuinely diverse range of territories.
This suggests that the future discussion about European Territorial Cooperation should not focus solely on programme priorities and budgets. It should also address the capacity of local and regional actors to participate in the first place.
At the same time, the cross-border sessions demonstrated that territorial cooperation produces something that is difficult to capture through conventional indicators: trust, relationships and institutional capacity. Projects may end, but networks and accumulated experience can remain. This social and institutional capital can be particularly important in border regions.
Governance matters as much as funding
Similar questions emerged in discussions on regional governance and planning.
Regional transformation requires cooperation between different levels of government, but also between public authorities, universities, businesses and civil society. Several contributions questioned whether conventional consultation procedures are sufficient and highlighted the need for more meaningful forms of participation and co-production.
An interesting example came from North Rhine-Westphalia’s REGIONALE approach. Rather than operating simply as another funding programme, REGIONALE encourages municipalities and other actors to develop regional cooperation around common challenges and projects.
One particularly interesting aspect is that the programme itself does not simply provide a separate pot of money for individual projects. Regional actors develop and qualify projects through a longer process, with successful projects subsequently linked to existing funding programmes.
The experience presented in Cologne suggests that temporary regional initiatives can leave lasting effects when they create networks, institutional capacity, shared knowledge and new forms of cooperation that survive beyond the original programme period.
This also raises a wider point about policy transfer. Successful approaches cannot simply be copied from one region to another. Different institutional structures, planning cultures and local circumstances mean that approaches have to be translated into their new territorial context.
From projects to regional capacity
This was perhaps one of the most interesting common threads running through the Congress.
The success of regional development cannot be measured only by the number of projects implemented or the amount of funding spent. An equally important question is what remains afterwards.
Did a programme create stronger local institutions? Did actors who had not previously cooperated continue working together? Was knowledge transferred to other places? Did temporary cooperation develop into a lasting regional capacity to act?
Seen in this way, the legacy of a regional development programme may be less the individual projects it funded than the capacity of local and regional actors to continue acting together after the programme ends.
Where does CLLD fit?
These discussions have direct relevance to the future of local development in Europe.
If EU funding becomes more strategically concentrated and nationally coordinated after 2027, mechanisms will still be needed that allow territories to define priorities from below and connect local knowledge with wider regional, national and European objectives.
For LDnet, this brings the debate naturally to LEADER/Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) and other place-based approaches.
Their future relevance may lie not only in managing relatively small funding envelopes. They can also provide an institutional space in which local actors organise, develop strategies, experiment, build partnerships and connect their territories to wider regional and European objectives.
This does not necessarily mean choosing between top-down regional policy and bottom-up local development. One of the lessons I took from the Congress is that the more interesting question may be how the two can be connected: European and national objectives providing a strategic framework, regional approaches translating these objectives into territorial strategies, and locally driven partnerships contributing knowledge, initiatives and implementation from below.
The challenge for the post-2027 period is therefore not simply to preserve existing instruments. It is to ensure that local development remains an integral part of the emerging architecture of European cohesion and competitiveness policy.
Pedro Brosei, Board member of LDnet
2 October 2026
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