Portugal 2020 and the new glossary of territorial development: territorialization or neo-institutionalization?

Abstract Portugal lives a new political and administrative framework, resulting both from the redesign of local administration architecture that generated the inter-municipal entities (Law 75/2013) and from the new European Community framework (2014-20). This context implies a new territorial policy aimed at the territorialization of policies and accordingly a new instrumental glossary of development. This paper, grounded on a national and international state of art and focusing on strategic documents, presents the new development glossary and a raises a problematic: the open and participatory agendas vs. the instruments in an “elaborated code”; the “innovative” purpose vs. the “ritualistic” means; in short the territorialization vs. the neo-institutionalization of public policies. We proposed, therefore, in conclusion, that the new Portuguese and European Community framework have important limitations since policies present goals/aims that are territorial and people-centered but with instruments/means which are designed as institutional and to be managed by experts. Such findings put multilevel government and governance in question, implying further research on ideal/real relations between society and state, and on the distance between expected and real participation.