To economy and beyond: The liveability of regions understood through the lens of social, cultural and environmental regional development policies.

Intro
Regional development and regional resilience, often described as the capacity of a region to for example bounce back in terms of employment after a crisis (see for example have often been described in economic terms, using economic indicators such as growth in GDP or demographic indicators such as net migration or employment.
Some researchers argued that regional development should be understood broader, by including for example social indicators and living environment indicators . In addition, in recent years researchers have shown that policies directed towards regional development have broadened as well , but are also still evaluated within specific narratives or frameworks that often constitute the goals of the policy, for example the Keynesian framework favours increasing demand and favoursthe evaluation of policies aimed at exactly this .
By using the broader framework from Pike in combination with sifting through numerous data sources from EUROSTAT and OECD, researchers in the PREMIUM_EU project developed a new framework that is measuring Regional Development using 15 economic, 13 social and 5 living environment indicators.
This new innovative interpretation of Regional Development also opens up discussions on the efficiency of developed implemented and evaluated public policies.
Method
By regarding regional development (and individual indicators) as an outcome of public policies on the local, regional, national and international level and by analysing regional development policies on different levels from 2010 and onwards we believe it is possible to understand the impact of these policies in a more evidenced based sense, regardless of the above mentioned different types of narratives or frameworks.
We started our research with an analysis from the OECD on the different types of regional development policies and the relations between different levels of government within countries. Based on this and literature research, we developed a framework with relevant topics for regional development policies and different levels of government.
Based on the work of Moritz Schütz presented during the ERSA 2024 conference, we developed and employed an webcrawler to automatically download and analyse policies and also manually tested the results of this exercise.

Findings/results
The webmining exercise in combination with the new set of indicators will offer a much broader and more comprehensive view of the use and necessity of regional development policies. The findings will be discussed in dedicated policy labs with policymakers and researchers from the respective regions.
Discussion/conclusions
Both the new set of indicators and the analysis of the policies are not only innovative, but will also be viewed as speculative. Although we believe that a direct causal relationship between policies and the regional development will be hard to uncover, we do believe that this research will move the field of policy analysis forward, because it is more focused on evidence-based indicators and is based on larger sets of policies.
Literature
Christopherson, Susan, Jonathan Michie, and Peter Tyler. ‘Regional Resilience: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3, no. 1 (1 March 2010): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsq004.
Cuadrado-Roura, Juan. ‘Regional Policies. What (It Seems) We Have Learned from the European Experiences’, 313–34, 2012. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857935748.00024.
McCann, Philip, and Raquel Ortega-Argilés. ‘Smart Specialization, Regional Growth and Applications to European Union Cohesion Policy’. Regional Studies 49, no. 8 (3 August 2015): 1291–1302. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.799769.
Pike, Andy, Andrés Rodriguez-Pose, and John Tomaney. Local and Regional Development. Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rug/detail.action?docID=4595358.
Pike, Andy, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, and John Tomaney. Local and Regional Development. Routledge, 2016. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315767673/local-regional-development-andy-pike-andr%C3%A9s-rodriguez-pose-john-tomaney.
Rigby, David L., Christoph Roesler, Dieter Kogler, Ron Boschma, and Pierre-Alexandre Balland. ‘Do EU Regions Benefit from Smart Specialisation Principles?’ Regional Studies 56, no. 12 (2 December 2022): 2058–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2022.2032628.