Structural Funds and Their Impact: Signed and Sealed,But Can We Deliver?

This paper seeks to examine some of the lessons from the past: in particular the 1994-1999 programming period of the EU Structural Funds. It then proposes to examine the current UK implementation of the Structural Fund programmes for 2000-2006 and raise some issues which currently emerge in terms of the UK government's new policy agenda affecting economic development. Thereafter the paper develops this analysis in order to raise some early issues in preparing for post-2006, which need to be considered in the post-devolution era in the UK.     

Evaluating the governance of structural funds programmes: The case of community economic development in South Yorkshire

Methods for evaluating regional and urban policies have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. However, this paper argues that the evaluation of Structural Funds programmes has systematically underplayed the effect of governance on both programme design and implementation. This paper uses the role of voluntary and community sector organizations in promoting community economic development initiatives within the European Union's Structural Funds programmes in South Yorkshire as a case study. An argument is made for extending evaluation methods, especially theory-based evaluation, through using multi-level governance as a “theory of change”. A key finding is that to explain how programmes work, evaluators need to consider formal partnership and management arrangements, their traditional focus, but also wider governance structures and the importance of informal policy networks. Such a focus allows for a consideration of issues such as resource mobilization and power.     

Europeanization and De-Europeanization of Estonian Regional Policy

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the role of the EU can be considered highly important in advancing institutional reforms and overall development in Estonia. The article focuses on Estonian regional policy (RP) and analyses whether it has gone through Europeanization (i.e. convergence with EU regulations and values, or followed its own development path). The institutional cycle model of territorial governance is used for establishing the analytical framework. The research was largely carried out as a second-person action research and used interviews over the period of 1990–2011. The article concludes that Estonian RP shows considerable dynamics as public and political support to RP, administrative structures and policy tools have changed. Europeanization of Estonian RP was most visible in 1994–1998, when an institutional framework was created, in parallel with intensive learning from the West. Overall, in 1999–2004 the application of EU cohesion policy tools took place with significant convergence. After joining the EU in 2004, national RP programmes were reduced, the institutional framework was frozen and a selective application of EU rules and the use of EU cohesion policy measures for achieving some personal political agendas started, driving Estonian RP away from common European values.     

Strengthening the Polycentric Urban System in Europe: Conclusions from the ESDP

The first European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) document agreed in May 1999 calls for closer cooperation at the EU level in response to the challenges posed by globalization and the increasingly transnational impact of spatial development in Europe. The ESDP maps out a common approach to spatial development in the EU member states and supports an integrated perspective for European spatial development which goes beyond specialist viewpoints. This article focuses on the relationship between key statements on the European urban system contained in the ESDP and the 'real' structures and changes within this urban system. It also examines possible conclusions from the ESDP for urban policy in Europe in the light of the activities already launched to translate the ESDP into practice in the urban dimension of European spatial development.     

Analysing How Environmental Concerns are Integrated in the Design of the EU Structural Funds Programmes

This paper analyses the environmental measures co-financed by the European Union (EU) Structural Funds in the less-developed regions. Specifically, it studies if these environmental measures are tailored to the specific needs of the different regions and whether they are driven by an ecological modernization approach. The inclusion of environmental goals into the regional policy is also tested by analysing its connection with the main European environmental directives. We find a suitability of the regional programmes to the regional specific environmental factors, a scarce presence of the ecological modernization paradigm behind the programmes implementation and a clear orientation of the regional programmes to meet the EU legislation.     

The White Paper on European Governance: Implications for Urban Policy

This paper discusses the recent European Commission White Paper on European Governance, arguing that the document offers interesting possibilities for the future development of the European Union (EU), how it is governed and more particularly for 'European Urban Policy'. However, the paper argues there are problems with its use of the term governance as a strategy for reform and with a number of its proposals to widen access to the European Commission (EC) and the policy process. With regard to urban policy it is suggested that the White Paper's emphasis on a greater role for sub-national government and citizens' is to be welcomed. Although once again it is unclear whether the Commission has fully thought through the implications of its proposals both for itself and the groups it wishes to engage with. More specifically it is argued that the Open Method of Coordination is broadly similar to the methods whereby both current urban (and spatial) policy have been developed and should be embraced. Overall the White Paper is something of a mixed bag; however, this is to be expected of a document which is primarily intended to stimulate discussion about the future of EU governance.     

The Emerging 'Urban Agenda' and the European Spatial Development Perspective: Towards an EU Urban Policy?

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of escalating problems in European urban areas caused partly by economic and technological changes in the European and global economies. The most visible representation of these changes has been a growth in urban unemployment and social exclusion. The European Commission has taken a growing interest in these issues and attempted to develop an European Union (EU)-wide approach to urban change. The focus of this paper is on the Commission's attempt to develop an 'urban agenda' and to promote policies which are more 'urban sensitive'. With reference to the 'urban agenda' this paper examines the contribution of, and problems associated with, two Urban Communications recently published by the Commission and the European Spatial Development Perspective. It then assesses the prospects for the development of an EU Urban Policy, arguing that an 'explicit' urban policy is unlikely to emerge in the short or medium term.     

Determinants of the Uneven Regional Participation of Firms in European Technology Programmes. The 'Low R&D Trap'

Technology is of key importance to the growth of regional firms and economies. Research has shown the association between low technology development or take-up and regional disparities. Hence technology policy is moving closer to the heart of regional policies. European innovation programmes are intended to involve firms, large and small, in international technology research and development networks. The paper focuses on the involvement of Spanish firms in such programmes. Participation tends to be low if business R&D, presence of large firms, and the development of regional innovation systems are also low. Creation of R&D infrastructure through the Structural Funds has now to be prioritized at EU level and also define a new scheme of sectoral priorities in order to support R&D innovation activities in fields diverse from high-tech, if regions are to escape the 'low R&D trap'.     

The Budget of the European Union and its Contribution to Finance Programmes for Health and Consumer Protection

The objective of this paper is to shed light on the dynamic financial aspects of the European Union's (EU's) strategy towards financing the programmes for health and consumer protection. Also it presents the perspectives of the new community approach to public health, while it recognizes that although EU's efforts, member states remain responsible for the organization and delivery of health services and medical care. Therefore, community's actions simply complements national policies. The paper analyses also aspects of the budgetary data provided by the European Commission Concerning the allocation of funds in all the areas and activities of the EU's budget focusing the attention on EU health programmes. The paper underlines the need for an integrated, transparent and proactive public health at all levels in the EU while, it emphasizes the need to promote, in European and national level, a broad strategy on public health to meet the key responsibilities and new challenges.     

Europeanization in Time: Assessing the Legacy of URBAN in a Mid-size Italian City

The 2007 mainstreaming of URBAN raised important questions about the sustainability of its regeneration approach under the new regulatory regime, and particularly about the policy legacy left by this Community Initiative in its participating cities. Taking advantage of the recent conclusion of the 2007–2013 programming period, these questions are tackled here both theoretically and empirically. Building on the general model of Europeanization, the article posits a trade-off between local misfit with the URBAN approach and the durability of the policy change induced by the scheme. The argument is then illustrated through an in-depth study of Pescara, a mid-size Italian city that participated successfully in URBAN only to lose most of its policy innovations in the immediately subsequent programming period, when it took part in the country's mainstreamed funding scheme, the “Programmi integrati di sviluppo urbano”. With hindsight, the study suggests that URBAN was set up to fail exactly those cities with little experience in integrated and participatory regeneration that it was supposed to help the most. It also concludes that future European Union policy-making and implementation should factor in the misfit/durability trade-off to maximize effectiveness given the Union's goals as well as its involvement expectations.     

Re-investing in the Built Environment: A Spatial Network Approach

Before launching ambitious and expensive development programmes to induce new regional technology corridors and clusters, it is critical to appreciate existing spatial economic patterns in a region. Initial economic conditions drive location decisions of firms and a labour force such that any changes must intercede onto an existing landscape built for current economic conditions. This work adopts a simple regional economic model to integrate and review traditional and modern urban location theories in order to illustrate the power of initial conditions to determine a final result. A simple spatial dynamic simulation model captures many of the pertinent effects of real estate pricing patterns to frame both opportunities and constraints to re-shape an urban landscape. Attention to 'ground up' spatially correlated location patterns revealed in price data that suggests close attention to strategic zoning can have profound impacts on the success or failure of economic development. Relatively modest policy interventions that carefully utilize existing preferences for urban amenities and concurrent real property investments involve fewer policy risks with potentially more powerful stimulative economic consequences than promised in more ambitious programmes.     

EU Regional Policy After 2006: Will Scotland Notice the Difference?

In order to accommodate the recent enlargements of the European Union (EU) there has been considerable changes to the operation of EU regional policy which means that Scotland along with other regions in the EU-15 will receive considerably less money from the Structural Funds in the future. This article discusses the extent to which the reduction in EU funding for economic development will impact on the Scottish economy. The issue is explored by considering the contribution, which Structural Funds have made in the past to economic development in Western Scotland, which has received the lion's share of the money allocated to Scotland. It is suggested that whilst the amount of economic development in Scotland will not be significantly reduced as a result of the decline in EU funds the types of projects and organizations receiving funding will alter because of changes made to the way in which the funds are administered in Scotland.     

The EU integrated urban development policy: managing complex processes in dynamic places

One of the European Union’s 2014–2020 cohesion policy’s new aims is to promote integrated urban development strategies that enhance sustainable urban development. Following the emergence of the integrated urban development policy, city policies in EU show a trend in that direction but overall changes towards a sustainable integrated urban development are limited. One of the major problems for planners and implementing actors seems to be the management of complexity, which originates in three sources: the policy, the planning and implementation processes as well as the implementation place. The paper elaborates on the question: what is triple complexity and how can planning and implementing actors of the EU integrated sustainable urban development policy manage it? The paper suggests the use of a place-oriented theory and proposes a theory-guided ex-durante (ongoing) evaluation called Place Scan. I assume that the method can support planners and implementing actors to manage complexity and to improve quality of ex-durante evaluations.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

'Euroscepticism', Political Agendas and Spatial Planning: British National and Regional Planning Policy in Uncertain Times

Over the last 10 years, European Union interest in planning has increased significantly. Although land use planning remains a function of each member state, the legal obligations imposed by the EU in the fields of environmental law, structural funds, the Common Agricultural Policy, and Trans-European Transport Networks, have all impacted upon the context of the operation of the British planning process. Many of the EU initiatives have had to be transposed into domestic legislation, while others form an important-if oft-times uncertain-framework for British policy-makers. This paper examines the relationship between the European Union's policies and initiatives as they have potentially impacted upon the British planning system and the contents of Britain's national and regional planning policy guidance to local planning authorities in the assessment period 1988-1997. But the Conservative governments adopted a 'Eurosceptic' approach to their relations with Europe and, as demonstrated within this paper, also towards spatial planning issues that caused uncertainty in practice. The research indicates that although the EU has impacted upon British planning, particularly at the local level of government, this has not been reflected at the national and regional levels in planning policy documentation, mainly because of the 'Eurosceptic' attitude of the government. Policy-makers at both the national and regional levels in England, Scotland and Wales are now recognizing the need, however, to keep apace with changes occurring simultaneously with regard to enhanced European integration, and the approach of the Blair government since 1997 has re-focused the relationship between the EU and UK over spatial planning.     

The open method of coordination and policy mainstreaming: the European employment strategy and regional conversion programmes in the UK

This article is a critical exploration of the issues raised by the attempt to integrate aims and concerns derived from one European Union (EU) policy domain into another. It does this via an examination of the ways in which the European Employment Strategy (EES) has been taken into account in the design and initial implementation of Structural Fund programmes in the 2000–2006 round. In particular, it examines the nature of this ‘mainstreaming’ relationship in terms of the structures and mechanisms associated with current Objective 1 programmes operating in the UK. It maps out the vertical and horizontal linkages between European, national and regional levels, and assesses the extent to which strategic frameworks, programme guidance and programme content have successfully integrated EES considerations. The article concludes by identifying some implications for theories of European governance.     

Urban Planning in Italy: The Future of Urban General Plan and Governance

This article aims to highlight and, whenever possible, demonstrate that the urban general plan is still the instrument of the utmost importance to trigger and steer urban transformations. Within the current Italian context, the article examines the characteristics, contradictions, weaknesses and opportunities of urban planning set of rules and practices and tries to propose concrete answers to questions and issues strictly connected that affect the municipality's urban planning: how to manage and govern a contemporary metropolis or city agglomeration, the concerns associated with overlapping jurisdictions and different rules for various hierarchical administrative levels, the costs of social and common services, the need to include in the urban plan the possible use of European Union Structural Funds, the real estate market affecting new development and urban regeneration programmes and investments. All these aspects should be included in a unifying and strong planning instrument, the urban plan, which could address and steer effectively the urban planning policies and their governance.     

Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.     

The Importance of Context and Comparison in the Study of European Spatial Planning

The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) was agreed in 1999 at Potsdam, Germany, as a non-binding framework intended to guide spatially significant policy-making at different spatial scales in order to achieve a more balanced and sustainable growth of the EU territory. This paper develops a conceptualization of the nature of transnational planning frameworks such as the ESDP and presents a framework for the investigation of the application of their policy orientations in the spatial planning systems of European states. It is argued that investigations of the application of transnational spatial development frameworks like the ESDP and the ‘Territorial Agenda of the European Union’ document adopted by EU member states in 2007, need to be sensitized to the diversity of territorial contexts in which these apply, and that a contextualized and comparative approach is therefore essential in evaluating their influence in Europe's varied territories.     

'New Programming' and the Influence of Transnational Discourses in the Reform of Regional Policy in Italy

Recent developments in regional policy in Italy may be interpreted as outcomes of a mutual fertilization between two distinct policy discourses, concerning the reframing of regional programming in the framework of a reform of the State, and the promotion of local initiatives in a perspective of endogenous development. This paper presents a critical itinerary of the mutual evolution of these lines of discourse during the 1990s. Their provisional merging in the framework of the strategy of 'new programming' adopted in connection with the reform of the Structural Funds and with the new community support framework (CSF) for the period 2000-2006 is interpreted in light of the 'Europeanization' of Italian public policy and of the influence of its progressive embedding into transnational policy discourses.