Networking and the politics of EU regional policy: Lessons from north Rhine‐Westphalia, Nord‐Pas de Calais and North West England

The Europeanisation of Sub-national Governance

“…For example, central government often prevented local authorities from appointing their own representatives to the monitoring committees. But some studies found that the Commission has been able to shape the programmes, particularly by encouraging alliances between local authorities, such as over the creation of regional strategies (Burch and Holiday, 1993;Conzelmann, 1995;Martin, 1998), as occurred in the north-west of England.…”

“…UK local authorities were largely passive, allowing the central-state organisations to be the leader and to formulate the projects, making sure that the UK takes up its share of European funds. In Germany, taking the cases of North West Rhineland and Saarland, Anderson notes the dominance of the federal government; yet these regions, and also some local authorities, started to lobby Brussels directly and were able to access discretionary European funds, a nding supported by Conzelmann's (1995) study of North RhineWestphalia. The main difference between the countries derived from their institutions.…”

“…Few networks emerged speci cally to handle the structural funds. As Conzelmann (1995) nds out, taking Nord-Pas de Calais as a case study, the DATAR and state agencies remain the key decision-makers. Not all accounts of subnational relationships take such a negative view.…”

From Government to Governance: Regional Partnerships in Sweden

“…A range of terms has been coined for analyzing what are basically aspects of the same phenomenon -policy networks (Marsh and Rhodes 1992, van Waarden 1992, Jordan 1990, Conzelmann, 1995, development/advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993), interorganizational relations (Hanf and O'Toole 1992;Hanf and Schrarpf 1978), mordern governance (Kooiman 1993, Rhodes 1996. Notably all concepts mentioned above are open-ended and indicate that there is no given demarcation line between the public and the private sphere.…”

Dual Networks in European Regional Development Policy

“…Thus the policy network has become one of the main analytical tools in the study of a multi-level EU. (Peterson, 1995a;Conzelmann, 1995;Smith, 1995;Balme and Jouve, 1996;Rhodes et al, 1996;Anderson, 1995Anderson, , 1996. This article is sympathetic to the empirical claims of multi-level governance and to the analytical usefulness of the policy network concept, but takes two weaknesses of these approaches as a point of departure.…”