How to develop rural regions and to combat social and regional disparities?

Lessens from the cohesion policy

The Structural Funds of the (

European Union)

One of the core aims of European integration is to act politically against social and regional disparities. The cohesion objective is laid down in the treaties of the European Union since the late 1980s (the ‘Single European Act’), and the Structural Funds offer the main instruments to achieve this goal. 308 Billion € have been allocated to these funds for the period from 2007 to 2014 and about 283 Billion €

Of this sum are devoted to the so-called ‘Convergence Objective’ by which research, innovation, environmental protection and risk prevention as well as infrastructure investment are supported, especially in the least-developed regions  .

Although the EU structural funds are politically contested – which is not unusual for a redistributive policy – some lessons can be learnt from their implementation during the last two decades which can be instructive for the design of similar policies in other parts of the world. These lessons concern mainly the way political interventions are planned and implemented to address specific regional problems and to mobilise spatially embedded so-called ‘endogenous potentials’.  The paper will in a first part make clear that not all kinds of problems related to regional disparities and especially to rural depopulation) can be solved politically. This will be done by introducing and clarifying the concept of governability. According to this concept emphasis should be given to endogenously, i.e. politically determined areas (like rural constrains and opportunities of policy-making – instead of trying to govern (or to coordinate in a societally binding way) everything in line with what might be desirable.

In a second part (the main part of the paper) lessons will be considered which can be drawn from the planning and implementation of the EU Structural Funds. These reflections  will be centred on the way how politically determined constrains and opportunities of policy-making at the regional level are addressed to realise what is desired and known by affected actors and commonly perceived as achievable by them.