Role of Higher Education for Circular Economy Related Capacity Building

At the general level, Capacity Building was implemented for improving the strengthening of the human resources capabilities in a Public Administration. This paper aims to highlights the significant role of the Capacity Building projects, as well advantages and disadvantages of them and provided a useful framework to design Capacity Building approaches for the Circular Economy (CE) at a meso scale. Particularly, since 2019, the Department of Economics, Management and Business Law of the University of Bari Aldo Moro, sited in Apulia (Southern Italy), set an active role in Capacity Building, through a partnership with the Agriculture Department of the Apulia Region, to provide a project for implementing Circular Economy in the Agri-food sector. We adopted a methodology based on a qualitative analysis to verify how the Capacity Building tool interacts with the research and reveal the underlying strategies applied on MoDEC, a project based on the relationship between university and institutional administration. Some provisional results highlight that the Capacity Building of this public department has been significantly strengthened in terms of the CE in a regional economy. The monitoring measures were undertaken through a bottom-up approach that involved various stakeholders of the agricultural supply chain. The approach applied in the MoDEC is replicable and allows the transfer of knowledge and good practices to widespread digital learning and a soft culture among stakeholders, creating a virtuous network to be implemented, not limited to the Circular Economy, within the macro-scale Mediterranean and the Euro-Asian corridor.