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.     

ENACTMENTS OF URBAN NATURE: CONSIDERING INDUSTRIAL RUINS

Post‐industrial imagery and the functions of ruins can evoke novel dimensions of spatial structures and organization. This article discusses the question of how interactions between urbanity and nature are articulated and enacted within the redesign of industrial ruins. The socio‐ecological configurations produced in this process include multiple realities about nature that become fragmented and contested in practice described by various authors using different concepts which are viewed critically. The concept of urban nature is elaborated because it enables one to problematize more‐than‐human entities in making particular commons and can reveal some interactions between semiotic and ecological systems. Theoretical approaches are illustrated by a case study of initiatives taking place in the former heating plant of Tallinn. The study indicates that engagement with nature has evolved through abstract vitalization visions of the ruins and moved to tactile encounters of experimental gardening. The evolutionary aspects of nature were used as guidelines for enabling weak structures of creativity, and the rationalities behind the experimental garden got contested and partly refocused over time.