From Experimentation to Cumulative Capacity: Uneven Skills Governance in Regional Wine Economies

This article examines how territorial skills-governance configurations condition the capacity of specialised wine economies to transform local experimentation into institutional learning and, over time, cumulative capacity.It compares the Siena wine-producing area in Tuscany, central Italy, with the Trentino wineproducing area centred on San Michele all'Adige in northern Italy.Both cases belong to the VINO network developed within the ConnActions Italy-Germany cooperation framework in dual vocational education and training.The comparison shows that knowledge retention does not, by itself, generate cumulative capacity.This depends on whether prior learning remains accessible, can be mobilised in subsequent processes of change and is connected across institutional settings and territorial scales. Skills governance and institutional learningGreen, digital, climatic and regulatory transitions are changing both the competences required in specialised production sectors and the conditions under which those competences are used.Expanding training provision does not, by itself, secure their effective use, because skill use depends on work organisation, productive strategies, and wider institutional arrangements (Keep and Mayhew, 2010).This is particularly relevant in wine economies, where production remains embedded in territorial knowledge and institutions while firms operate through glocal value chains (De Marchi and Grandinetti, 2016).The question is therefore not whether territories generate new knowledge, but under what governance conditions experimentation becomes learning that can be retained, institutionalised and mobilised beyond its original setting.A relational understanding of skills ecosystems shifts attention from individual stocks of skills to the institutional relationships through which competences are formed and used (Ramsarup, McGrath and Lotz-Sisitka, 2023).These relationships connect work, education and productive organisation, but local networks cannot be treated as self-sufficient.Spours (2024) identifies the risk of "network idealism" when horizontal relations are detached from the politicaleconomic and state conditions that enable or constrain them, while Ramsarup, McGrath and Lotz-Sisitka (2023) show why transitions in learning and work need to be understood relationally and across scales.The Viticulture Ecosystem Model (VEM), adapted to wine-producing territories from the Social Ecosystem Model (Spours, 2024;Bucalossi et al., 2026), operationalises this perspective by examining the institutional relationships through which actors coordinate across levels, policy and knowledge translate between domains, and learning stabilises over time.Governance quality concerns how these relationships operate; institutional learning and cumulative capacity are outcomes to be explained, not properties inferred from institutional form.The comparison draws on publicly available institutional, programme and sectoral documentation relating to the two territorial configurations.