Marcin Dąbrowski

EU cohesion policy, horizontal partnership and the patterns of sub-national governance: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe

This article draws on the concept of Europeanization to assess the EU cohesion policy’s capacity to promote inclusive regional governance and cooperation in regional development initiatives in Central and Eastern European countries. EU cohesion policy is often credited with improving cooperation and coordination in the delivery of the regional development policy through the application of multi-level governance enshrined in the partnership principle. By imposing a close partnership among a variety of actors, cohesion policy has the capacity to alter domestic relations between the centre and the periphery, and to create a broader scope for regional and bottom-up involvement in economic development policy. However, a lack of tradition of decentralization and collaborative policy-making, as well as a limited capacity of sub-national actors, can result in uneven outcomes of the application of the partnership principle across countries and regions. This raises questions about the transferability of the partnership approach to new Member States characterized by weak sub-national institutions, a legacy of centralized policy-making and limited civic involvement. This paper addresses this issue by comparing horizontal partnership arrangements put in place for the purpose of cohesion policy implementation and examining their impacts on the patterns of sub-national governance. The horizontal partnership arrangements are compared across three regions in countries with differentiated systems of territorial administration: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Challenges of multi-level governance and partnership: drawing lessons from European Union cohesion policy

The 1988 reform of the structural funds (SF) set the foundations for European Union (EU) cohesion policy (CP), arguably one of the most innovative and large-scale, if controversial and often criticised, policies addressing uneven economic development and territorial disparities. The reform reflected the shift towards new regionalism (Amin and Thrift, 1995; Cooke and Morgan, 1998; Storper, 1995, 1997), an approach considering the regional scale as key for economic development underpinned by robust regional networks and site-specific ‘relational assets’ such as trust and social capital (Beugelsdijk and Schaik, 2005; Putnam et al., 1993). These ideas triggered a paradigmatic shift in the developed countries from an ‘old’ regional policy paradigm based on a centralised approach and the use of subsidies to compensate for the location disadvantages of lagging regions towards a ‘new’ paradigm. According to the latter, regional policy should strive to tap into the underutilised potential of regions through an integrated investment strategy to develop human capital and infrastructure, implemented in cooperation across the different levels of government (OECD, 2009). CP has served as a test bench and springboard for regional policy instruments focused on regions as the main units for intervention and including the sub-national and non-state actors in the policy process through vertical and horizontal partnerships. The region was considered as an adequate scale both for strategic planning and exploiting intangible assets such as trust, proximity and flows of knowledge between the regional actors (Bachtler and Taylor, 2003: 15), while the participation of the regional authorities and stakeholders was supposed to ‘improve the prospects for effective development policies by including those actors close to the problems and priorities of targeted regions and groups’ (Bache, 2008: 46). The partnership principle, requiring close cooperation across the European, national and subnational levels of government and inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, has been the cornerstone of CP and its distinctive system of multi-level governance (MLG). The term was coined by Gary Marks to describe the way in which CP operated through a ‘system of continuous negotiation among nested governments at several territorial tiers’ in which Challenges of multi-level governance and partnership: drawing lessons from European Union cohesion policy

Towards place-based regional and local development strategies in Central and Eastern Europe? EU cohesion policy and strategic planning capacity at the sub-national level

The EU accession of the Central and Eastern European countries required adjustment to EU cohesion policy and its framework, based on multi-level governance and territorially targeted financial support for regional development. This involved reforms of territorial administration, the developing of regional policies and the building of the capacity for administering structural funds. This article investigates the mechanisms of adjustment to the programming principle of EU cohesion policy which requires that the structural funds are used according to multi-annual strategies and place-tailored operational programmes. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with regional actors in Polish, Czech and Hungarian regions, the article focuses on the impacts of this EU-imposed approach to the practices of the regional and local actors. It finds that EU cohesion policy overall promoted strategic and place-based development planning in the Central and Eastern European countries. However, its impacts remain differentiated and often limited to ‘superficial’ changes. The article argues that there are factors hampering the institutionalisation of multi-annual strategic development planning. These include the overemphasis on the ‘absorption’ of EU funds, patronage networks affecting decision making, and the reluctance of the central governments to let regional authorities set their own investment priorities, thus denying the very purpose of strategic planning tailored to regional specificities.

EU–China and EU–Brazil policy transfer in regional policy

ABSTRACT The paper investigates the European Union (EU)–Brazil and EU–China regional policy dialogues, viewed as vectors of cross-national policy transfer. Regional policy is considered as having limited transfer potential due to its inward orientation, context specificity and complexity. Yet, knowledge exchange and voluntary policy transfer have taken place between the EU and Brazil and between the EU and China since the mid-2000s. The study investigates and compares actors, motivations, mechanisms of transfer, conditioning factors and types of outcomes, shedding a light on the under-researched phenomenon of international policy transfer in regional policy.

The challenge of implementing European Union environmental law in the new member states: The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive in the Czech Republic and Poland:

This article examines the problematic implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) in the Czech Republic and Poland from the perspective of the scholarly debate on European Union (EU) and post-accession compliance, focusing on the competing ‘goodness of fit’ and administrative-legal approaches to explaining variations in compliance with EU rules. It finds that administrative shortcomings of various kinds are a major reason for implementation problems in both countries, and that problems have also stemmed from the multilevel nature of the implementation process, which places a heavy administrative and financial burden on municipalities, and requires cooperation between national and local government authorities. In the Czech case, however, the ‘misfit’ between EU standards and contracting and regulatory practices in the Czech water sector has also undermined UWWTD compliance, through its negative impact on the countrys ability to access EU funding.

Introduction: drawing lessons from international policy-transfer initiatives in regional and urban development and spatial planning

ABSTRACT The collection of papers in this issue brings new insights to the processes of international policy transfer and learning in the fields of regional and urban development policy, regional innovation and transit-oriented development. It explores, through the perspective of different disciplines, the motivations of actors, tangible and non-tangible outputs, the role of factors affecting the process, and the spillover effects of such process. The contributions bring new insights into what represents success and failure in policy transfer and provide valuable lessons for policy-makers facing the challenges of a fast-changing global context.

The development of strategic spatial planning in Central and Eastern Europe: between path dependence, European influence, and domestic politics

ABSTRACT Focusing on three of the Central and Eastern European countries – Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary – the paper investigates the evolution of spatial planning systems and the introduction of strategic planning practices from the beginning of the post-communist transition in the early 1990s to the present. It sheds new light on this issue by applying the conceptual lens of historical institutionalism to explain this process and elucidate the role of the accession to the European Union (EU) as a catalyst for change. In particular, the paper identifies and analyses the critical junctures at which path dependencies emerged and later constrained the capacity of the regional and local actors to adjust to the EU Cohesion Policy framework and engage in strategic planning as part of it.

Boundary spanning for governance of climate change adaptation in cities: Insights from a Dutch urban region

Adapting to climate change in the urban setting requires cooperation across scales, levels of government, organisational boundaries and policy sectors. The study presented in the paper explores governance of urban adaptation policies through the conceptual lens of multi-level governance and boundary spanning. It focuses on the South Wing of the Randstad in The Netherlands, an urban region that is heavily exposed to the negative impacts of climate change, particularly to flooding, due to its location in the Rhine-Meuse delta and concentration of population and economic activity. Yet, it is also a region with strong traditions of cooperation and a track record of pioneering urban climate change measures. The study investigates how the features of the wider institutional context, in which this urban region operates shape the governance of urban adaptation policies and how the contextual factors constrain the scope for spanning horizontal, vertical and temporal boundaries needed for delivering those policies and making the cities of that region more climate-proof.