Old industrial areas
Good practice case study
Marinha Grande TEP, Portugal
Faced with a need for re-conversion of the glass-making industry, a partnership in Marinha Grande led by the local authority and including local entrepreneurs developed a strategy to increase the competitiveness of the town’s glass and moulding industry for consideration by the Portuguese Government as a ‘zone of excellence’. The partnership also sought and gained recognition from the EU as a Territorial Employment Pact.
Key lessons from the experience of Marinha Grande TEP are that:
- creating a new local ‘image’ (for example based on quality, excellence and co-operation) is vital, particularly where an area currently has a negative one (based on social unrest and strikes in the case of Marinha Grande);
- establishing a structure where local political power (e.g. the municipality) can have dialogue with local economic power (e.g. local business leaders) can widen the scope for action where national or local (public) funding is limited;
- without the decentralisation of significant amounts of national funding to the local level, local approaches will struggle to become sustainable and will continue to depend on external sources such as EU funding.
Case study
Marinha Grande Territorial Employment Pact [pdf, en, 11kb]
