Master CoDe presentation

Master CoDe aims at providing participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to analyse, plan, implement, and assess socio-economic processes at local-level in open economies, polities, and societies. Students acquire through the programme a sound academic background and the capabilities and skills necessary for operating on the different components of economic and social processes at local level, including devising and implementing policies.

Such capabilities are important also for managing social strain and strengthening democracy, managing territorial disparities and economic and social inequalities, supporting recovery and upgrading economies, overcoming the consequences of the global crisis and the threat of growing economic protection, reforming public administrations and polities in the direction of decentralisation and regional integration, and promoting diffused entrepreneurship. These capabilities are the bases upon which students can actively introduce into the learning process their own local knowledge and expertise and contribute to find solutions for a set of different case studies.

The Master has developed into a fully two-years, 120 ECTS second Bologna tier (previously it was a 95 ECTS programme) starting from the 2011-2012 academic year.

The Master has distinct European added value because it provides European leadership to an international Consortium, which includes four EU universities located in territories with an outstanding experience on local development Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), University of Regensburg (Germany) and the UNiversity of Trento (Italy) and third countries’ universities University of Belgrade (Serbia), Tshwane University of Technology (South Africa) and the University of North Carolina of Chap Hill (USA).

A key aspect of the programme is the interaction within an international group of students and the particular attention to multicultural aspects when teaching. Over 9 years, CoDe has involved over 230 students from more than 40 countries. These students bring extensive experience in their own countries’ local development programmes along with their academic training. CoDe has developed an academic programme that is truly transnational and in which European and non-European experiences and knowledge benefit one-another.