The Strategic Governance Illusion: Who Really Orchestrates European Innovation and Sustainability

This thesis analyses the governance dynamics in European research and innovation (R&I) consortia in the sustainable mobility sector, adopting a mixed sequential-explanatory research design that integrates quantitative Social Network Analysis and qualitative documentary analysis. The aim is to make visible the invisible relational architecture that determines the distribution of coordination power within Horizon Europe programmes. At the macro level, SNA is applied to a sample of 1,222 nodes and 1,470 direct weighted arcs, extracted from 120 CORDIS projects in the transport domain. The results reveal a Core-Periphery structure (Q = 0.797) with oligarchic concentration of orchestration power in the Northern European bloc and systematic dissociation between coordination capacity (WOD) and technical excellence (WID). The thesis formalizes three original theoretical contributions: the NAO model as a positional gatekeeper rather than a neutral broker; "subalternity of excellence" as a structural condition of high-cognitive actors excluded from governance; and "shadow coordination" as a methodological blind spot for institutional data-driven analyses. At the micro level, an embedded case study analyzes the trajectory of EUAbout across three consecutive projects (LEONARDO, L2M, INMOB), documenting mechanisms of relational path dependency, selective persistence (63% and 42% of recurrent partners), and the dissociation between nominal coordinator and real orchestrator in the INMOB project, highlighted by the financial reversal between UNICT (9%) and EUAbout (12%). Regarding managerial implications, the thesis proposes three concrete operational tools: a Consortium Trajectory Mapping tool, a minimum WID threshold for coordinator eligibility, and the European Innovation Trajectory Platform (EITP), a public digital infrastructure for tracing relational, technological, and patent continuity between successive projects.