From the window of his grandmother's flat in Montesacro, a neighbourhood straddling Rome's centre and periphery, Lorenzo Mascioli watched a park transform throughout his childhood. First came the fence and playgrounds, then a basketball court, a football pitch. Later, a bus line appeared, followed by a train station and cycling lanes. It was a development trajectory that would shape not just a neighbourhood, but a research career.
"I really saw through this park a development trajectory that made me reflect on the importance of having development policy, development projects within any community," Lorenzo recalls. Meanwhile, friends living further from the centre experienced something entirely different. "Instead of a park maybe we would see a parking lot, something completely different that would frame the development trajectory of the place and significantly affect the opportunities available to people and the aspirations that people would construct about themselves."
That childhood observation now drives his research into why development policies help some communities thrive while leaving others behind. In the last four years as a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, Lorenzo studied territorial inequalities and public policy for regional and local development, focusing particularly on the dramatic variation in how communities mobilise, implement, and benefit from EU-funded development projects.
The puzzle is striking. "We see development policy helping some places thrive, change their trajectory, for example, from a trajectory of rural stagnation or industrial decline to something more sustainable," Lorenzo explains. "In other places we see very similar projects being organised but with very different outcomes." Some never mobilise, with no interest from the local community. Others are organised but poorly implemented. Still others are completed but fail to trigger lasting change, becoming what Lorenzo describes as "cathedrals in the desert, meaning that they remain as infrastructures that are systematically underutilised by the local community."
During extensive fieldwork across three Italian cities, Trento in the north, Lecce in the southeast, and Reggio Calabria in the southwest, Lorenzo encountered a particularly illuminating contrast. Two projects, both funded by the EU’s flagship development programme, Cohesion Policy, both aimed at upgrading public spaces in peripheral southern cities with histories of underdevelopment, produced radically different results.
In Lecce, a cultural centre became a vibrant hub, hosting seminars and workshops that draw crowds to the city's periphery. During Lorenzo’s fieldwork, it welcomed presentations by figures like Nicola Lagioia, winner of Italy's prestigious Premio Strega literary prize. In Reggio Calabria, by contrast, a similar project to improve a public school has been completely abandoned. The building now sits swallowed by vegetation, "like a jungle, something that was completely forgotten," Lorenzo says. In both locations, EU flags still mark the presence of European funding against these starkly different backgrounds.
"These two projects are both funded by the cohesion policy, they are similar in what they try to do," he explains. "In theory, they could have had similar outcomes, but in practice we see completely different situations."
The conventional explanation for such disparities points to institutional quality. The dominant literature in economic geography suggests that places with stronger institutions are more effective at mobilising and implementing development policy. But this explanation troubles Lorenzo, precisely because institutional quality tends to be higher in already developed regions. "As a result of that, development policy risks becoming regressive, risks becoming more effective in places that are already advanced," he argues. "You even risk increasing territorial inequalities through development policies that in principle are designed precisely to reduce those inequalities."
Lorenzo’s research challenges this institutional determinism by introducing a crucial distinction. Traditional development policy relied on infrastructure projects like highways and bridges, or public subsidies flowing directly to specific sectors or firms. Under that model, institutional capacity was indeed paramount. But contemporary development policy operates through an entirely different mechanism: projects bounded in time, space and resources, managed not by government departments but by multi-actor networks spanning different levels of government and non-governmental actors.
This shift toward what Lorenzo calls "projectification and networkisation" has created a separation between traditional institutions, which are established and evolve outside development policy, and local governance systems, which conversely emerge endogenously from specific development projects and continuously change as old projects expire, and new ones begin. His research demonstrates that governance systems are often as important as institutions in shaping development policy outcomes, sometimes even more so. Moreover, these two factors closely interact with each other: "Governance systems do not operate in a vacuum, they operate on top of a broader underlying institutional environment," he notes.
The policy implications are significant. "I'm not saying that institutional reforms are not useful or not important. They certainly are," Lorenzo clarifies. "I totally believe policymakers should continue to try and improve institutions." But rather than focusing exclusively on ambitious institutional reforms that apply to large jurisdictions like states or regions, which take years to implement, and potentially centuries to fully take effect (he cites political scientist Robert Putnam's argument that differences in institutional performance between northern and southern Italy trace back to the Middle Ages), policymakers should also reform local governance systems. “I think we should try to change the configuration of the local governance system to enhance the performance of development policy at the local level," he argues.
Compared to institutional reform, this approach has three key advantages. First, it can address more granular, localised variation. "Institutions refer to big jurisdictions like states or regions," Lorenzo explains. "It's much more difficult to explain the differences that we observe within a certain region or within a city with institutions." Second, it is cheaper: "Sometimes, you don't even have to make an investment in order to change the local governance system. You just need to be aware of how your governance system is structured and try to think about changing the configuration of the system so that it becomes more effective." Third, "the reform of a local governance system is almost immediate in how it can affect the performance of development policy.” With institutional reform, “ we have to wait, and while we wait, we could see that development policy exacerbates inequalities instead of reducing them," Lorenzo argues. "By contrast, the reform of a local governance system is much quicker to take effect."
This pragmatic approach reflects Lorenzo’s broader research philosophy. He describes himself as a "pragmatic scholar" who focuses on research problems rather than specific theories or methods, deploying whatever tools, quantitative or qualitative, are needed to answer the question at hand. It is an approach that has produced rich insights but also significant challenges.
"I struggled throughout my PhD to position myself within a specific debate," he admits. "My research is located somewhere at the crossroads of economic geography, public policy, and comparative political economy. But it doesn't belong inherently or specifically into any one of these disciplines." Publishing, finding an academic community, attending conferences, all become more complex when your work bridges multiple fields. "Instead of going to your annual conference, you have to go to three because you want to speak to three different audiences."
Financial constraints also limited his fieldwork, a challenge he believes is shared across many PhD researchers, especially in southern Europe. Yet he was encouraged by his supervisor to pursue this interdisciplinary path, and has found scholars in each field willing to welcome "an in-between person that could help create bridges between disciplines."
"It's a high effort, high reward strategy," he reflects.
That strategy, rooted in observations from a grandmother's window in Rome, may ultimately help ensure that development projects become parks rather than parking lots, cultural hubs rather than abandoned buildings, catalysts for opportunity rather than monuments to wasted potential. In a Europe still grappling with persistent territorial inequalities, Lorenzo’s research suggests that how we organise around projects may matter as much as the projects themselves.
Lorenzo Mascioli, from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, has recently defended his PhD thesis ‘Governing Development: Local Networks and Public Projects in Contemporary Italy’, supervised by Prof. Anton Hemerijck. During his PhD, Lorenzo held teaching positions at the EUI’s Florence School of Transnational Governance and visiting positions at Sciences Po Paris and Princeton University. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies, Sciences Po Paris.
Photo credits: Lorenzo Mascioli