The European Union developed a set of different policies to deal with different problems, such as macroeconomic stability, unemployment, inequality and the environment. However, these problems are interconnected and cannot be adequately addressed without an integrated approach that takes into account the different territories, which is possible within the existing EU institutional framework, as we shall argue while identifying the key European institutions necessary for doing so. But this integrated view has not been adopted so far. We argue that a normative circular conception of the economy provides a more adequate framework for advancing full employment within a place-based integrated approach while articulating the microeconomic, mesoeconomic and macroeconomic levels and/or all governance levels.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio