The role of Universities in the pursuit of local community empowerment, sustainable, smart and inclusive development in resilient communities. A comparison analysis of post-conflict Croatia and Kosovo

Considerable attention has been paid, recently, to the adoption of community governance-based approaches to help addressing developing and post-conflict countries’ need of achieving a minimum level development due to the lack of institutional authority or scarce Government’s capacity to adopt effective solutions to issues of economic and social development and protection of fundamental human rights of the community. Universities have assumed an expanded role in local economic and social development especially in institutionally fragile countries and have helped to initiate a slow, but effective process of development within communities and territories, as the evidence collected in two Balkan post-conflict countries, Croatia and Kosovo, will demonstrate. By leveraging insights from the literature on Community Governance, Community Resilience, social capital, capacity/capability building, and sustainable development, this paper emphasises a socially embedded and community-centric approach to development of territories as a strategy to transform post-conflict situations into contexts of community empowerment. On these premises, the working hypothesis this paper will be based upon is that Universities are actors, amongst the others, which most likely drive territories and their communities towards resilience though steering processes of learning and adaptation, though the shaping of a knowledge based economy and through promoting sustainable development by facilitating the increase of social capital stocks. The paper’s research question is conducted through a methodology based on a qualitative investigation that has been carried out in two countries of the Balkan region both affected by the Balkan’s War which ended in 1995. Central to the transformations developed in the aftermath of the end of the war is the emergence of new approaches for the country’s resilience. The establishment of network-based relationships amongst actors helped triggering processes pursuant strategies of development supported by the role played by Universities that have helped creating the building up of social capital within the communities. The paper, moreover, will seek to demonstrate that social capital leveraged by Universities plays a significant role in compensating for the weaknesses of formal structures responsible for public education, community empowerment being a crucial variable affecting policy change processes resulting from the modernization agenda. Therefore, the argument that Universities could be strengthened or weakened by informal networks connecting formal institutions with the wider society and for that reason they should be studied.