Reflexiones sobre la perversión de la Responsabilidad Social Corporativa

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Basque Cluster Policy’s Governance: Towards a Multi-level Approach?

Co-authored with Mari Jose Aranguren

The article represents a further attempt in evaluating the governance mechanisms within the Cluster Policy in the Basque Autonomous Region (Spain) with a common framework and methodology. The Basque Cluster Policy has been implemented since the early 90’s through different Cluster Associations (CAs), with the aim of fostering regional competitiveness. These CAs are public funded institutions for collaboration whose main objective is to improve each cluster’s competitiveness by facilitating and fostering cooperation/collaboration among the range of agents that join CAs (members); these include firms, R&D centres, universities, government and so on. Nevertheless, since the pioneering implementation in the 90’s of Porter’s regional clusterisation methodology (1990, 1998), the Basque Cluster Policy has largely ignored the issue of evaluation in its broad sense, and only partial research has been done within the area of policy governance (Ahedo, 2003, Larrea et al., 2008).

Considering the influence of the multiple sub-regional administrative levels and institutions interacting in the Basque region there are arguments for a closer policy approach (Laranja et al., 2008), to better tailor policies and help firms, especially SMEs. Thus in remarking the fundamental importance of managing clusterisation processes, combining both top-down and bottom-up perspectives supposes a challenge for policy making. The perspective of a localised, diffuse and incomplete knowledge of economic activities (Hayek, 1945) should stimulate an active participation not only from the Basque Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism (regional level), but also from municipalities, counties and provinces as well as national and international institutions involved in the search for improved competitiveness. This paper will analyse how Basque Cluster Policy is managed in order to consider a multilevel governance viewpoint, making adjustments to each cluster’s specific idiosyncrasy.

In this exploratory context, and using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we try to identify the distribution, representativeness, and participation characteristics of the diverse types of members that join each AC across the Basque region. After that, the second aim of the paper is to make a proposal to the ongoing debate around the role of how Basque policy-makers from different levels could promote better ways to foster all agents’ involvement and engagement within CAs.

The basis of quantitative analysis consists of a territorial analysis of each CA’s members in order to detect patterns of geographical distribution across the Basque region. Thus, taking into consideration that the Basque Cluster Policy is a regionally coordinated policy, this analysis detects whether a uniformity in the distribution of members’ across the whole region is apparent. The paper incorporates data obtained from the three main information sources available: SABI-Informa database (economic results from all Spanish firms), CIVEX (Basque Industrial Catalogue of Firms that export) and DIRAE (Economic activity directory from the Basque Statistical Institute).

On the other hand, the qualitative analysis is based on the adaptation of The Cluster Initiative Greenbook (2003) to first evaluate the reality of Basque CAs, considering a wide range of questions related to different fields such as CAs’ history, strategy, finance, and governance.. In this way, we enrich the quantitative analysis with viewpoints that are a fundamental element within the Basque Cluster Policy context, in particular integrating the opinions of CAs’ managing directors.

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate around the role of the Basque Cluster Policy across territorial dimensions in two aspects. First, it combines a detailed diagnosis and deepens analysis into aspects of the problem of how members are being coordinated by Cluster Policy and CAs, as well as identifying their main difficulties with regards cooperation. Second, and derived from the first, relevant and specific proposals for Basque Government and other policy-makers will be developed on how to foster involvement of small firms in the Basque Country through cooperation in strategic areas in order to increase their competitiveness.