INTERCO - Indicators of Territorial Cohesion

Main research areas

• Description of territorial cohesion based on existing policy documents in order to define the objectives and indices which can be used to measure territorial cohesion, complex territorial development, structural issues, territorial challenges/opportunities and territorial effects.
• Clarify the interrelations between the main territorial challenges, the policy orientations and the issues to be measured
• Drawing from these interrelations three main research activities for the construction of the indicators are the social/institutional dimension, the theoretical dimension and the empirical dimension. The approach will be participatory, conceptual and pragmatic.
• Identification and involvement of the relevant stakeholders in the creation and evaluation of indicators and in setting the targets
• Identification of the issues that should be measured at different spatial and temporal scales by different types of indicators
• Transparency and Comprehensibility of the indicators identified.
• Communication of indicators and indices in a clear and attractive manner which enables everybody to understand them
• A mixture of indicators will be taken into account like classical socio-economic indicators, indicators on thematic/territorial issues and new composite “territorial cohesion” indicators reflecting the main territorial challenges
• Applying the 5-level-approach where relevant and feasible

Main results envisaged

In the first phase the involvement of the stakeholders is the centre of attention and the project shall be embedded in the wider ESPON and policy context, before defining the Indicators in the second phase. The third phase will be focused on the calculation of the indicators and the last phase will be devoted to the communication of indicators for territorial cohesion.

• Study of relevant policy documents regarding concepts and indicators
• Participation processes to collect ideas for useful indicators from policy makers and the ESPON Community and to evaluate the preliminary results of the study leading into an Evaluation Report
• A detailed evaluation matrix for the indicators
• Potential of existing and new indicators evaluated in terms of quality and relevance
• List of data sources and data providers providing required input data
• GIS-based indicator toolset incl.: d-base, GIS and statistical tools and mapping functions
• A set of calculated territorial indicators and indices, presented in maps, statistics and tables
• A set of indicators and indices, including metadata, for the overall ESPON database
• Communication Plans for the interaction with other ESPON projects and for the interaction with policy makers and stakeholders