How Communities of Practice can drive local innovation and collaborative governance
Europe's digital transformation ultimately depends on the ability of thousands of local public authorities, each with different capacities and priorities, to turn European and national strategies into everyday practice. Building Bridges explores how communities of practice can help bridge this gap through the case of the Emilia-Romagna Region's COMTem System and introduces the CoP Architecture Framework, a model for designing, sustaining and embedding communities of practice as a lasting infrastructure for collaborative governance.
The Challenge of European Digital Governance
The digital transformation of European public administration plays out on two levels: that of strategies defined at the European and national level, and that of their day-to-day implementation by thousands of municipalities, provinces, and local authorities, each with different capacities, resources, and priorities.
Bringing these two levels into dialogue is one of the most significant challenges facing European public governance. Communities of practice are among the tools that hold promise for achieving this, provided they evolve from informal exchange networks into structured mechanisms, oriented toward concrete outcomes and sustained over time by the institutions that host them.
The Emilia-Romagna Region's COMTem System
Building Bridges: How Communities of Practice can drive local innovation and collaborative governance reconstructs the theoretical foundations of the model starting from Wenger's work, explores its methodological evolution through the Communities of Practice Playbook developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, and closely examines the Emilia-Romagna Region's COMTem system, active since 2008 and today made up of ten thematic communities with 882 members from 132 organizations.
The CoP Architecture Framework
This analysis gives rise to the CoP Architecture Framework, a model that distinguishes the foundations responsible for the community's identity, the operating system that sustains its day-to-day functioning, and the conditions necessary to ensure its continuity over time.
The Framework is accompanied by three lessons drawn from more than two years of fieldwork alongside COMTem:
- the need to produce tangible results;
- designing participation rather than merely soliciting it;
- building connections between professionals working across institutional boundaries.
Communities of Practice as a Pillar of Collaborative Governance
Finally, the paper proposes a shift in perspective: communities of practice should no longer be regarded as experimental or temporary initiatives, but as a permanent layer of collaborative governance, capable of strengthening the learning, innovation, and adaptive capacity of public administrations.
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Key takeaways
- Communities of practice can bridge the gap between top-down policiy design and local implementation, but only if they are structured, output-driven and institutionally sustained.
- The CoP Architecture Framework is organized into six interdependent design components across three layers: foundations, operating system and sustainability.
- COMTem, the Emilia-Romagna Region's community of practice system (with over 880 members and 130 organizations, active since 2008) is one of the most mature examples in Europe of institutionally embedded CoPs and is the paper's main case study.
- Communities of practice reach their full potential when they are no longer conceived as experiments, but as a permanent layer of how the public sector learns and adapts.
Want to explore the model and the lessons learned in more depth? Download the full paper.
For questions or further discussion on the topics covered, you can contact:
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