Nicola Francesco Dotti

The Unbearable Instability of Structural Funds' Distribution

In order to promote “cohesion, competitiveness and cooperation” across Europe, the EU has established a common regional policy to support underdeveloped territories. This EU regional policy required to set up a very complex mechanism to implement such a huge effort to coordinate many interventions across highly differentiated territories. However, those territories are provided with very different institutional settings, and then the mechanism to coordinate all of them becomes particularly complex. The aim of this paper is to discuss the EU multi-level governance for structural funds (SFs), revising the origin, rationale and evolution of this policy in order to identify the limits of the institutional mechanism for the implementation of this policy. These limits will show their effects on the unstable distribution of SFs across the EU regions on a long-term perspective. Results show that the intervention of the EU is neither constant nor stable across regions, independently from their development paths. This instability should provide further arguments on the discussion about the SF policy and governance in order to take into considerations also institutional limits of the EU.

Mapping the Shadow Economy: Spatial Variations in the use of High Denomination Bank Notes in Brussels

Abstract The aim of this paper is to map the spatial variations in the size of the shadow economy within Brussels. Reporting data provided by the National Bank of Belgium on the deposit of high denomination banknotes across bank branches in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, the finding is that the shadow economy is concentrated in wealthier populations and not in deprived or immigrant communities. The outcome is a call to transcend the association of the shadow economy with marginalized groups and the wider adoption of this indirect method when measuring spatial variations in the shadow economy.

Abundant water, abundant knowledge: Cognitive patterns for policy changes in Brussels water management system

Knowledge plays an essential key role in the policymaking process for interpreting the available information, defining policy issues at stake and evaluating possible solutions – especially in complex policy issues like water management. However, for city-regions, knowledge is often a scarce resource due to the small size of the policy community, context-specific issues, limited availability of resources and experts, as well as the challenge of addressing complex issues that are often supra-local. This paper explores which patterns of local knowledge promote policy change and learning. Starting from the ‘policy paradigm’ concept, a cognitive–evolutionary approach is applied to analyse Brussels’ water management policy, which aims to address the major challenge of flooding. The variety of knowledge by local actors, the role of the policy paradigm of the local policymaking community in vetting information and evaluating alternative solutions, and the importance of local governments for retaining knowledge, are the main dimensions to understanding policy change and learning. City-regions benefit from direct contacts between actors facilitating exchange of knowledge, while supra-local decisions (e.g. EU directives) and local accidents can also trigger major changes. Based on my findings, policymakers tend to rely on technocratic patterns using already available knowledge, mainly whether decentralisation reshapes the policymaking community. While a technocratic pattern determines only minor changes and institutional instability undermines policy learning, policy entrepreneurs and participative patterns can promote major changes and learning if they are able to engage in dialogue with the dominant policy paradigm.