S3 and Recovery and Resilience Funds: A Case Study Built on the Experience of 10 Spanish Regions.

The EU's response to the COVID-19 crisis, namely the approval of the Next Generation package, provides an opportunity to explore to what extent the existing Smart Specialisation regional strategies and related ecosystems have been taken into account in the highly relevant territorial context in which the national Recovery Plans have been designed. According to our results the potential of the Smart Specialisation approach (S3) in relation with its place-based strategic prioritisation may have been overlooked in the process. The research is based on a desk review of relevant documents and recent literature in this field; followed by semi-structured interviews with regional planners and practitioners from 10 Spanish regions (autonomous communities); complemented, in a second phase, by the organisation of a focus group to validate the initial results.